


Nucleus

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Category: Original Work
Genre: Accidents, American Politics, Army, Bad Jokes, Character Death, Child Abuse, Chronic Illness, Co-workers, Confusion, Corruption, Cruelty, Cynicism, Death, Disasters, Discrimination, Dorms, Dubious Ethics, Economics, Emergency Medical Technicians, Exposition, Firefighters, Future, Gang Violence, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Historical References, Hospitals, Humanity, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Inflation, Light Angst, Major Illness, Mass Death, Medical Conditions, Medical Procedures, Medical Professionals, Military, Military Homophobia, Military Ranks, Minor Character Death, Neglect, News Media, Nurses & Nursing, Orders, Original Character Death(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Police Brutality, Racism, References to Illness, Religious Fanaticism, Sexual Assault, Soldiers, Terminal Illnesses, Trans Male Character, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2018-09-27 15:09:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10027367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: In a future America ruled by the iron fist of the Republican party, police brutality no longer makes the news, oil and coal resources have disappeared, and virtually all safety regulations have been removed. In their desperation for more money and a source of electrical power, the politicians in charge turn to the only answer: nuclear energy.Alex the EMT/firefighter is saddened by his job.Debby the surgical nurse is worried about her husband Mike and their transgender son, Kyle.Brendon the reactor operator is sick of his untrained and incompetent co-workers.Derek the soldier doesn't believe in his country, and only joined the military because of familial pressures.When one of the hastily-built nuclear plants is thrown into chaos by a natural disaster, their lives suddenly crash together as they fight to rescue the victims, control the damage, and finally cry out against the government's war on its citizens.





	1. When they've cut so many corners that it becomes a circle.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay. I'm not a nuclear technician, I'm not a fireman, I'm not a surgical nurse and I'm not a soldier. The technical and scientific information in this narrative is as accurate as I can make it through intensive internet research, but all the political exposition is what my imagination considers to be the worst-case scenario. None of the crap the Republicans do in this story is stuff that's actually happened (except for cops murdering black people for no reason).

 

The bill had passed, much to her dismay.

Deborah Blitt didn’t believe in god, but even she had hoped and prayed that it wouldn’t. It hadn’t worked, of course, because the bill had been passed. She wasn’t really sure how she could deal with it, either, because it was certain to be signed into law, and then it would become effective immediately. Even moving to another state wouldn’t fix the issue; it would be the same everywhere. And she didn’t have nearly enough money to leave the country permanently.

Turning away from the counter, Debby slid the Tupperware containers into the middle shelf of the fridge without looking and saw her son Kyle sitting at the table. He was staring into his cereal bowl, stirring the Captain Crunch absently in the milk without taking bites. The hand holding the spoon was shaking, and after a second she could see the silent tears rolling down his face. He hadn’t cried since he was six, when he’d skinned both knees on his bike.

“Kyle, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Usually she would chew him out for lying, because all fourteen-year-olds lied to their parents but she would do her damnedest to make him grow out of that habit. But even so, she knew what it was. Moving behind his chair, she rested her hands on his shoulders and gently squeezed them. Kyle pushed his bowl aside so that he could rest his face on the table, covering his head with his arms and shaking.

“I know, honey,” Debby tried to comfort him. “I know it’s really scary, but we’re going to do everything we can, okay?”

“I can’t go to school today!” he howled in response, muffled in the sleeves of his shirt. “I can’t! They’ll know, they’ll all know!”

“No they won’t,” she countered, continuing to massage his shoulders. “And if they do, dad will kick their butts.”

She meant it to be a joke, but immediately realized that it probably wasn’t helpful. She could only imagine what Kyle was probably feeling.

“I CAN’T GO TO SCHOOL!” he screamed, briefly shifting upright to slam his fists on the table for emphasis. “I don’t even care about their stupid shit anyway, it’s not like school ever teaches anything you need to know! What does algebra have to do with anything? It’s the most stupidest thing ever invented! Screw them! I’m not going, and you can’t make me!”

Again, normally Debby would’ve bawled him out for swearing. But she knew Kyle had somewhat of a point. School had taught useful things when she’d been his age, but after a series of “religious freedom” laws (religious oppression was more like it, she thought) they were forced to reject most of science and start teaching so-called _Christian_ ideals. School funding had also been castrated, so they had very little resources left to teach kids anymore. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it turned out the cafeteria actually did serve cold canned dog food like Kyle often claimed.

So, she was shocked even to hear what she said next: “You’re right, Kyle. I can’t make you go to school… and you know what, I’m not going to try either. Besides, the cops are so busy shooting black people that they won’t have time to go after a kid who doesn’t show up for class. So… how about this, you can have summer vacation a little early and go visit Nana, Granddad and Aunt Nichole in Vancouver?”

Kyle wiped his face on his sleeve: “Really?”

“Yeah. You can Skype us whenever you need to, and if we can, we’ll take time off from work and visit you. Okay?”

He offered a wavering smile, relief bright in his eyes. “Thanks, mom. Do they… you know, have T in Canada?”

“Yeah. They have better laws than us, too, so it’ll be a lot cheaper.” Her son didn’t say anything else, and gave no protest when Debby pulled him into a hug. “I’ll help you get your stuff ready once we’ve gotten plane tickets, even your Xbox.”

“Okay. I just… I really don’t want to go back to being a girl.”

“I know, honey. You won’t have to, I promise.” She gave him a final squeeze and let go. “Okay. I have to go to work in a few minutes, but your dad will be home at the usual time. If he ends up pulling a long shift, though, he’ll call me and I’ll order Domino’s for you. Just stay inside, okay? Don’t go to 7-11 for soda or anything, we’ve got some in the fridge already.”

“Okay, mom. Thanks.”

As she heard the steps creak under his feet while he climbed the stairs, Debby wondered how she’d afford a plane ticket for her son. She already pulled twelve-hour shifts at the hospital most of the time, and when she wasn’t it was because they were sixteen-hour shifts instead. She’d only had one day off in the last month, and it took ridiculous amounts of cheap Italian-roast coffee to keep her alive. Even ten years ago, which seemed like another lifetime now, her job and her husband’s job had been more than enough to keep them afloat. But the ridiculous inflation had changed all that, so in spite of being an OR nurse and Mike being a security guard at the nuclear plant they were barely making ends meet these days.

Sighing mentally, Debby came to the conclusion that they’d probably have to give up their shitty cable and internet for at least a few months in order to fly Kyle to Canada and still be able to buy food. But at least her son would be safe.

As always these days, she silently cursed the government for their stupid laws, because even though it was _technically_ still legal, it would be so expensive and difficult to continue Kyle’s gender-confirmation treatments that maintaining everything and caring for his mental health was about to become impossible. As she climbed into her car, she already knew the thoughts would follow her until she fell asleep when she got home.

 

“How many today?” Jake asked when Alex climbed out of the ambulance.

“Seven,” he muttered grimly. “Fucking seven, man. Two of them were kids. All the older guys who do this are so, I don’t know. Cold. They don’t fucking care anymore, and you know what, when I started, I told myself I ain’t gonna be like them. But you know what, it fucking sucks too much. Why is it like this, man? I just give them an IV, take them to the ED and then hear in the news a week later that they fucking died. We don’t even make a dent.”

“Hey, man, you can’t think like that,” his friend urged as they climbed the stairs. “Remember that time you told me about last year, with the newborn? She did okay, right? I heard the mom came by with cookies or something later.”

“But that was only one time,” Alex sighed. He couldn’t shake the depressing pull inside his head. “And for every one time like that, there’s about a hundred fucking others that don’t end well. I mean, fuck. Just… fuck. Fuck.”

Jake didn’t say anything for a long time, and they ended up sitting opposite each other at a table in the kitchen. Xavier was cooking something, but Alex didn’t really care at the moment. It wasn’t like they usually got a chance to eat right away most of the time - too many shootings, stabbings and drug overdoses and not enough medics. On top of this, there had been a dramatic gap in the last few years between the need for emergency services and the number of people who actually became first responders. Too much training to go through, not enough pay, not really any good benefits.

Jake Durham and Alex Boyd were two of these personnel, mostly because there hadn’t been any other jobs for them. He sometimes wondered how there was such an urgent need for them, but even though there were no jobs anywhere else, nobody wanted to be one. But another part of him understood. He didn’t want to be one, either. Especially not now. Five of the shooting victims he’d seen already today had been, of course, black people targeted by the cops. The other two were Latino gang members.

In spite of everything, he’d rather be back in the situation they’d had a few years ago. When the nuclear plant had been under construction, workers had been injured by the truckload, overwhelming the EMTs so much that at least six people had died waiting to be seen to. But those had been accidents, real accidents, and not murders. He wasn’t sure how true they were, but there had been rumors for a little while that work guidelines hadn’t been followed or enforced and their tools were cheap. There hadn’t been anything in the news about it, though, so Alex had no idea how much of those had been based on fact.

But of course, his thoughts were interrupted by the obnoxiously predictable alarm. Alex couldn’t remember the last hot meal he’d had, and at this rate, he didn’t think he’d ever enjoy one again, or at least not for a while. Groaning and getting up, he started back to his ambulance.

 

“So like, somebody tell me this,” Rob Noah was saying. As always, he was yelling, even though they were in a small break room. Brendon Stahl didn’t glance up from his paperwork, knowing that Rob would keep talking whether people were listening or not. “Didn’t we have a bunch of jackass billionaires who had a hard-on for oil or coal or something? Nobody likes nuclear power, it’s expensive and all that. Why are they building these plants now?”

“Do you even read the news?” Ty Simmons grunted, his tone irritated. “Even on Yahoo or anything? They don’t give a shit about the stuff wrong with oil and coal, but there’s barely any left by now. It costs more for that crap than it does for uranium at this point, so now we’re back to uranium. And god forbid we use something safe.”

“Nuclear is safe,” Patrick Finch objected, which drew a sarcastic laugh from Ty.

“Yeah right. There’s been two level 7 accidents within thirty years of each other, plus the one at Three Mile Island in the 70’s. And even without that, I bet this place isn’t safe anyway. There was so many damn accidents when they were building, and who’s ever heard of a nuclear plant being built in just two years? It doesn’t happen that way. They cut corners for that, they must’ve. Someday the roof will fall on us in the control room or something.”

“The roof?” Rob repeated, his loud voice anxious.

“Or the wall, whatever. Maybe the light fixtures will catch fire.”

“They will?!” Rob yelped, panic written on his face.

“Oh my god, dude, are you _ever_ quiet?” Patrick butted in. “Seriously! We’re right here, you don’t gotta be so loud all the time! Why do you even work here, anyway? You should be in construction, you wouldn’t even need a megaphone to yell all the orders, everyone can hear you all the way in India.”

“My IQ is 147,” Rob answered uncertainly, though thankfully he had lowered his volume a little.

Brendon didn’t take part in the conversation at all, keeping his annoyance to himself. Rob _was_ obnoxious, but Patrick had been pretty rude himself. Something was off about Rob, but it didn’t seem to be his fault and Brendon didn’t think he even realized what he was doing most of the time. Besides, if anyone was unqualified to work at Edmons-Drake (the plant had been named after two of the guys in charge of the company that owned it), it was Patrick himself. He’d only been hired a few months ago, and Brendon could almost swear he’d only been trained for about a week. He’d chalked it up to budget cuts, but that didn’t make it a good thing. He always found himself agreeing with Ty, but he was afraid to admit it because he knew he couldn’t get away with it like the old man could.

Unfortunately, Patrick seemed to sense when people were thinking about him, because he started talking again, addressing Brendon now.

“Hey, how come you always spend your breaks doing paperwork? Don’t you ever stop working?”

“I want to keep my job,” Brendon answered bluntly, still not looking up from his nearly-overfilled plastic clipboard. _Because if anything, you’re proof they don’t care and they’ll replace me with anyone who reached a fourth-grade reading level,_ he thought, but of course he didn’t say it. “It’s called work ethic. Instead of picking fights with people, I do all the boring crap that I’m supposed to.”

Just because he wasn’t political didn’t mean he wasn’t passive-aggressive. But he usually got away with it because it was over Patrick’s head, and no complaints meant he’d never been reprimanded about it. In the corner of his eye, he saw that Ty was wearing a subtle smirk at his comment, which made him feel a bit less cranky. Ty had been more or less his mentor when he’d started at Edmons-Drake, and the old man had been working in the nuclear field for over three decades. Brendon had a lot of respect for him, and it still felt good to have his approval.

“Things were better back when I started,” Ty insisted, continuing his train of thought from before Patrick’s interruption. “All the regulations. Reactors were the safest places to work in the country. But it’s all gone to shit by now. It was annoying, sure. But it kept us from having accidents. My old man told me about Three Mile Island, because he lived nearby when it happened. Of course he was just a kid then, but he read about it when he was a little older. And the accident in Russia, has anyone told you about that? A ridiculous explosion. The place is still dangerous, even though they built a new confinement over it. They were cheap, they built four reactors in what was basically just a damn warehouse. Four reactors! And we’ve got seven here. And then later there was a tsunami in Japan, took out three reactors there. Now, that was an accident, something they couldn’t do anything about. But even still. If those safety measures hadn’t been in place, it would have killed people like the one in Russia. But I bet we have, maybe, half as many here as we’re supposed to. And I’ve seen filters for the respirators during drills that are out of date, but when I brought it up, Watterson just shrugged at me and said he’d look into it. Fifteen years ago, if I went to my boss with something like that, the whole plant would have been shut down in an uproar and half the staff would’ve been fired. I couldn’t believe him, he didn’t understand that it’s a big deal. Ridiculous. That’s the only word there is for it.”

“You know, I bet the things don’t even expire,” Patrick argued. “They just say they do, so they can make people buy more. I’ve heard that sometimes.”

“That’s not the point.” Ty shook his head. “If there’s even a chance they could stop working, it puts people at risk. And the only reason the dosimeters got calibrated on time is because me and Ted bitched about it enough until they did it so we’d shut up. That’s not okay, you know? How did we get to this? Damn.”

 

**_After the Republican party gained complete control of the government, they began cutting regulations for corporations across the board. While claiming this would help “job creators” stimulate the economy, in reality this only meant lower quality of services due to the lack of standards. The extra money went to the corporate owners, while they still continued to pay their workers less than what they needed to survive. Inflation skyrocketed, contributing to the problem, and despite the expense to the average consumer the products themselves were severely sub-par._ **

**_This was hidden from the general public as much as possible, while fearmongering distracted them from real issues. The environment also began to suffer enormously, causing “natural” disasters to occur with increasing frequency to the point where they’re almost considered normal. Some rebuilding efforts were attempted, but they were largely ineffectual due to lack of first responders. Most government spending was allocated to military budgets, with very little left for anything other than pointless warfare over inadequate and disappearing resources._ **

**_The economy suffered and the nation became stagnant. Quality of life for the majority of citizens nearly lowered to that of people living in “third world” countries, while an undeserving few reaped the rewards and lived in their own private paradises. With their enormous power and wealth, they were able to oppress the country in whatever ways they pleased without resistance._ **

**_Because of the suffering industry and the almost complete exhaustion of fossil fuels, energy production turned to nuclear power as a solution. But due to lack of industry standards, reactors were built in a hurry with minimal planning and the cheapest materials available. Emphasis was placed on speed of production, not safety, and on every work site at least one death occurred each month along with dozens of injuries in varying severity._ **

**_The safety measures applied to nuclear reactors during construction and for operation once they’d been completed were severely outdated for budget reasons and sometimes ignored altogether by supervisors. Within two years, ten new sites for nuclear power stations were commissioned, each having at least two reactors which were built simultaneously._ **

**_Ten workers died from falls when the safety measures were inadequate or absent. Seventeen workers died due to poisoning when working with chemicals during finishing work. Twenty-three were electrocuted by faulty equipment. Two burned to death as a result of improperly stored chemicals during a welding operation. Eight became trapped in various ways, either asphyxiating or becoming crushed. One was impaled by a falling object and bled to death before the ambulance arrived due to over-stressing of emergency services. Four workers were killed on the same site when the cable of a crane snapped and a load of cinder-blocks fell on them. This amounts to a total of 65 deaths, to name a few._ **

**_In two years, with a total 456 deaths and uncounted thousands of injuries, twenty-nine nuclear reactors spread across ten sites were constructed. Poorly constructed, with flawed designs and sub-standard materials, but constructed nonetheless._ **

**_To say nothing of their operation following completion._**

__


	2. When the Geiger counters haven't been calibrated.

[hey where wer u 2day]

[mom let me stay home. stupid laws about 2 be real so im going 2 canada]

[lucky bastard]

[sorry man. ill txt u all th time]

[how long u b in canada]

[idk]

[when u leaving]

[idk soon]

Kyle stuffed his phone back into the pocket of his jeans and slumped in his chair. He felt bad about leaving his best friend behind, the only other trans kid he knew. Whenever they were hanging out, it was usually at Kyle’s house because his mom was supportive, and also because Zach (Kaitlin) wasn’t out yet. His parents were the stereotypical religious nut balls, so he wasn’t allowed to transition. Kyle felt so bad about it that he always let Zach hang out with him over the weekend and borrow his clothes.

Kyle had been put on puberty blocking medications at 11 and started testosterone at 13, so he passed about 95% of the time, but Zach wasn’t on any hormones and looked like a 4’9” 14-year-old girl. Kyle helped Zach duct tape his chest tuck his hair under a baseball cap if they were going to 7-11 or anywhere else outside the house, even though boys with long hair wasn’t that uncommon. He just wanted to help his friend. At school Zach had always been made fun of for being weird, so they’d come up with the idea to pretend Zach was his girlfriend at school. It had immediately stopped after that, because Kyle was a defenseman on the hockey team and they knew he could kick their ass if he wanted to.

His phone buzzed again in his pocket.

[what am i going 2 do when ur gone]

 

“Hey Alex!”

“What?” he shouted from where he was squeezing a stress ball on his bunk.

“C’mere, shit just got real again!”

“Mother of god,” he muttered, standing up and moving into the common space without much hurry. “What are they doing this time?”

“Just look,” Ben Jones pointed.

Alex turned to the TV, which was on one of the news channels and showing a congressman. _“...and at least one new reactor to be built at the existing sites. This will mean more jobs and more electricity for everyone, without resorting to unreliable energy sources like solar or wind. The five new plants will be commissioned in New Mexico, Maine, Florida, Texas and New Hampshire.”_

“Ah, shit,” Jake cursed from the beaten couch. “Now we’ll be swamped again coming up with injuries, and Edwards just quit last week so we’re more short than we were last time. Asshats and their stupid power plants. Don’t they ever build anything else?”

“Prisons for people who aren’t white,” Ben pointed out dryly. “I bet there’s twice as many prisons as there are cities and towns by now. You know, last year before my grandpa died, he told me that we used to be the ones everyone ran to if their countries were treating them like shit. I’ve never seen that, though. Everyone runs from _us_ now. But all the politicians and everyone, they keep saying immigrants are a big problem and that’s why we’ve got no jobs. How does that work? Nobody comes here anymore, and half the country is locked up. Why are there still no jobs?”

Alex shrugged: “I mean, maybe there’s jobs in other places. Think it could be just us?” Even as he said it, though, he knew it couldn’t be true.

“Nah, man. There’s something stupid about the way all this works. Maybe we should all leave, too, you know? There’s gotta be someplace better. Where there’s enough jobs and enough firemen and people who actually _have_ health insurance.”

Jake gave a sarcastic laugh.

“Yeah right. All my runs last year I think I saw twenty patients with health insurance. Besides, where do we leave to go to? Any of the countries who _don’t_ seem to have their heads up their asses only take the ones who’re in trouble. We’re healthy white men between twenty and thirty, they’d never let us in. Plus my girlfriend looked into it, it’s fucking expensive anyway. How do you pay for moving to Germany or Australia when you make fifteen bucks an hour and a gallon of milk already costs ten?”

“Does anyone even drink milk anymore?” Alex wondered, frowning. He hadn’t had any in several years now.

“Yeah, rich people,” Ben answered bitterly. He shook his head. “Man, if I wasn’t a fireman, I wouldn’t even have a place to fucking live right now. I could give a shit about being stuck here on my days off, but someday I want to have a fucking shower without worrying about getting called on a run and still covered in soap.”

“Don’t we all just live here, though? At least most of us do, right?”

“I live with my mom,” Jake shrugged. “And I think Xavier has an apartment, but he has like six roommates. So it would basically be the same as living here with us all the time.”

“Does she still wash your socks and cut the crusts off your sandwiches?” Ben joked.

“They’re better that way,” Jake grinned, rolling with it.

Alex smirked, but he couldn’t find a laugh. He hadn’t found a laugh since he’d first started here.

 

“The 4:30 case was cancelled,” Penny DuQuest informed her.

Debby sighed with relief - both at the prospect of a break and that Penny had told her this only two minutes after she’d started setting up OR 4.

“What happened?”

“Dr. Wolfe said there was an error made somewhere along the line. Turns out the patient doesn’t have the right insurance after all.”

Immediately, her good feeling vanished.

“That woman has a tumor in her neck, how does this happen? I know there’s a lot of people who don’t have it at all, but why is insurance offered when it just refuses to help them anyway?”

Penny rolled her eyes and helped her remove the instrument packs from the OR. “I don’t know anymore. Casey said there was a pregnant woman a few weeks ago who delivered by C-section and was _sent home_ two days later. The boyfriend wanted to sue us for it until he found out it was the insurance company’s fault, so now he’s going after them. I don’t think he’ll get anywhere, though. Nobody ever does these days.”

“Healthcare is such a mess,” Debby complained as they left the sub-sterile hall and went into the locker room, pulling the bouffant from her hair and feeling her ponytail against her neck. “I went to nursing school because I wanted to help people, but it just feels like most of the time I’m not allowed to because the people who need it are too broke to pay the medical bills. How many people die because they can’t pay for a trip to the ED? Even my husband, he’s been having some erythema and his hair is thinning. I’m worried he could have cancer or something, but all our money is tied up getting my son out of the country and keeping our cars just barely functional. And he gets nuclear plant pay! They give him forty-seven dollars an hour, but seventy-five just barely buys a day’s worth of groceries. How is it that a hundred dollars isn’t a lot of money anymore? When I was a nursing student, a hundred and twenty dollars would buy me a month’s worth of cheap internet. Now our bill for the internet and Netflix together is about five hundred a month.”

The two women slid the shoe covers from their clogs and threw them away as they talked and checked the pockets of their scrub jackets for unused alcohol pads.

“The only reason Bill and I have a house at all is because it was my parents’ before they died and somehow they’d gotten it paid off. But his sister and her kids live with us and ours because otherwise we couldn’t pay the utilities and they can’t afford to live independently. How did we all live in our own houses when I was a kid? Away from everyone else? I think if I had that much space now, I’d go crazy because I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“We have our own house, but Kyle’s bedroom is about the size of a shoebox and it’s actually the attic with some crappy wallpaper. We have the real bedroom, but other than that the kitchen and the living room are the same space. Sometimes I feel bad, because I know Mike and I have more than most people do because our jobs pay a little more. But we don’t have much at all, either. Kyle has an Xbox because his grandparents gave him one for Christmas, but they live in Vancouver and have money. They send us part of their retirement, too. That’s really the only reason we’ve stayed afloat this long.” Debby sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I’m going to try and steal a nap, but you can page me if you hear anything, okay?”

Penny nodded. “The next case isn’t until six anyway. I’d have one too but it’s my month to check the crash-carts.”

Of course she was paged and woken up from sleep, and even though it had been half an hour it felt like she’d only gotten to lay down three minutes ago. Wrenching herself out of bed, Debby slid her feet back into her clogs and half-stumbled back to the OR hall. As she was about to reach the badge scanner to open the doors, though, Penny burst out of them and all but sprinted to her.

“Deb, an ambulance just brought your husband in.”

 

“Wh… where’re you takin’ me?”

“You’re going to the hospital, sir. I’m Alex, I’m a paramedic for the fire department. Your friends at the plant said you passed out after a safety drill. They called us and your skin looks pretty red, so we’re just going to have the doctors check you out, okay? Just try to stay calm, sir.”

“I can’t… our ’nsurance migh’ not pay.”

“Don’t worry about that, most insurance pays for emergencies,” Alex replied, making a mental note of the slight confusion the patient seemed to be having.

Ben backed the ambulance into one of the empty bays and opened the doors. Alex had the end of the stretcher at the man’s head and a doctor was, surprisingly, waiting for them. Usually it was a nurse or even just a security guard because the hospital, like their fire station, was severely understaffed.

“What have we got, boys?” the doctor asked as he stretched cheap exam gloves over his hands.

“Forty-six-year-old male, brief loss of consciousness after strenuous activity. Currently presenting mild delirium and erythema of the hands, neck and face. Vitals are stable and well within acceptable limits. No fever.”

They pushed the man into an empty cubicle and Alex heard the doctor start pulling the curtain as they transferred him to one of the hospital stretchers. As the nurse was also entering the cubicle, Alex and Ben left the emergency department so that they could get back to work. In the corner of his eye he could see his partner tapping at his phone screen.

“What’s up?”

“Just looking up that guy’s symptoms… they seemed pretty random to me.”

“Yeah, I was surprised when I took his temp and it was normal,” Alex admitted as he climbed into the back of the vehicle and started sorting things out so it would be tidy for the next run. “He looked like he was in pretty good shape, too, so I don’t know how he’d just pass out after a training exercise. I heard those nuclear plant guards are practically marines.”

“Maybe he saw blood and fainted,” Ben joked as he pulled the driver door shut and turned the engine.

“At least it was something other than a fucking gang stabbing victim,” Alex grunted, feeling them pull away from the hospital as he made sure there was an IV starter kit within easy reach. “Or some guy who got shot by the cops. It seems like that’s all we ever get anymore.”

 

Once Brendon’s shift had ended, he turned in his dosimeter as per usual before leaving the building and crossing the grounds to one of the administration buildings. He wasn’t sure why so much office space had been built, because they didn’t have as many pencil-pushers as Ty often said there should be. But this was really a good thing, because enough of the staff (himself included) couldn’t afford a place to live that they’d hit upon the idea to just sleep there. They’d pried apart the desks and bookcases to build makeshift bunks, and even though it wasn’t comfortable or remotely private it was still better than sleeping in a cardboard box. They’d at least saved the chairs, so one of the conference rooms was more or less a common area and even had a television that someone had brought in.

Unfortunately, being one of the younger workers, Brendon had one of the higher bunks that was annoying to climb into. It was a pain to haul himself up there for sleep, but he was used to it by now. At first it had been excruciating to sleep on a disassembled office desk with nothing but an old sleeping bag for hiking, but by now he’d amassed enough blankets and other padding that it was bearable.

 _Ugh, I’ll have to wash them all soon,_ Brendon thought to himself, wrinkling his nose. His bedding was starting to smell gross again. He grabbed his sweatshirt from where it was stuffed into the corner of his bunk and dropped back down to the floor, changing into it and tossing his work shirt back up. Laundry was another hassle, but there were enough janitor’s closets with basins in the administration buildings that there usually wasn’t a problem with waiting.

Brendon smirked at a typical sight in their stolen sleeping quarters: “So, how much are we glowing right now?”

Nick Phillips brushed off the joke, still checking the room around him with the wand of the Geiger counter. For some reason, the guy was always worried about leaks, so when his shift ended he would always poke around their living spaces to make sure there wasn’t some kind of accident.

“The needle’s still at zero,” the short man replied flatly, his dark eyes glued to the dial of the antique counter. The clunky thing had probably been around since the 1950’s. “It’s just weird, really. The probability of something happening before now was pretty good, if the construction accidents are anything to go by.”

“Oh, god, have you been talking to Rob again?” Brendon groaned, rolling his eyes and stuffing his hands into the front pouch of his sweatshirt. “That guy’s so freaking weird, I don’t know why he works here. He always thinks the reactors are about to bust open for no reason.”

“I had a friend like him growing up,” Nick replied slowly, only now glancing at Brendon from the corner of his eye. “Twitchy, jumpy. He was loud, too, and obsessed with building architecture. Andy was so smart, he always had better grades than me even though he took about five minutes to complete an entire standardized test. And he became a construction worker.”

“Um… well, good for him I guess. He found a job.”

“That’s not the point. Nuclear reactors are _Rob’s_ obsession. He doesn’t know he’s doing it, and he’s not annoying on purpose. We need to just let him do his thing. It’s not like he’s a bad worker or anything, and he doesn’t spread rumors about other people.”

Brendon paused for a second before his shoulders slumped in defeat. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I just get kind of tired of hearing about how an accident is just waiting to happen here. I know this place should’ve been built better, Ty told me all about it. But c’mon, if there was gonna be a leak don’t you think there would’ve been one by now? Besides, it’s not like we’re the ones _building_ the plants and a stack of bricks is going to fall on our heads.”

“It’s okay,” Nick acknowledged. “You know, it’s really exhausting to be afraid of shit all the time. I’m kind of jealous of you sometimes. You don’t even notice.”

Brendon smiled, but it was an expression of cynicism.

“With all the other crap I see and hear about, I could give a rat’s ass about a leak. Besides, it’s not like they ever check our exposure anyway. Even if there is one, we’d probably just keep working here like always. Nothing would change.”

Nick snorted in agreement: “Yeah, I heard Ty and Ted bitching about the Geiger counters not being calibrated. I bet it’s because Watterson’s so cheap, he doesn’t care if we start growing extra fingers and eyes.”

“Does that actually happen if you take too many rems?”

“Hell if I know. I think it could be mostly kids, though. So just buy some lead boxers.”

Brendon laughed, then slapped the other man’s shoulder before leaving the room so he could watch a football game with the others.

 

**_Radiation is a danger that people can’t see, hear, feel or smell. The first major studies of its effects on the human body was conducted in Japanese hospitals following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Though this provided a spectrum of information on radiation poisoning, the database is still somewhat limited as the illness has only been encountered on rare occasions. As nuclear weapons have not been used since then, the greatest danger at the present time (especially considering hasty construction as previously noted) is to workers who staff nuclear power stations. While not reported by the government, which controls nearly all channels of media, there have been minor accidents resulting in injury or death to at least one worker._ **

**_Kevin Bauer, 38, non-licensed operator: During the opening of a valve to control water flow, a poorly-welded pipe joint cracked and sprayed the worker, soaking his clothes before emergency repairs were made. He was exposed to 103 rem of radioactivity, but only changed his clothing and returned to work. He was admitted to the hospital after his wife forced him the following day, and while he recovered from the radiation sickness, he is still struggling to pay the medical bills._ **

**_Adam Greenslit, 29, mechanical technician: While performing routine maintenance in a turbine hall, faulty wiring caused an electrical fire only five days after the reactor had begun operation. He suffered severe burns to his face and chest when the fire caused some improperly-stored chemicals explode. (The chemicals were unable to be identified.) He was rushed to the hospital by ambulance and died from complications related to smoke inhalation two days later._ **

**_Chester Klock, 30, chemistry technician: Due to lack of safety procedures and training, the worker was forced by his supervisor to aid in the transport of spent fuel to a containment building (which is not a function he was responsible for). A faulty container ruptured and contaminated him with more than 450 rem of radioactivity. Within an hour he’d begun vomiting and certain parts of his body became inflamed. He was taken to the hospital by ambulance with acute radiation syndrome, and died nine days later as a result._ **

**_Michael Foster, 22, chemistry technician: In the same incident that killed Klock, the worker was also exposed to radioactive particles. Although receiving only 327 rem of radiation, a significant amount of the waste-isotope Strontium-90 accumulated in his bones, destroying his red marrow. Despite numerous transfusions he died after twenty-five days. A fetal liver cell transplant to replace the marrow could have saved his life, but as abortions are a criminal offense in the country, this procedure was impossible._ **

**_Again, to mention only a few._ **

****


	3. When the engineer goes on break without asking.

Debby was surprised when Kyle picked up right away: “Hi, mom. Is dad getting home late?”

“No, he um… he got taken to the hospital because he passed out at work. He’s going to be okay, he just needs to stay home from work for a few weeks.”

“Why’d he pass out?”

“He just has some chronic exposure, that’s all. The doctor said he just needs some rest and to drink plenty of water.”

“But I thought we can’t afford to go to the doctor, mom.”

“This is different, since it’s an emergency we only have to pay about a thousand dollars instead of the whole bill. Besides, now you can play games on the Xbox with dad before you fly to Vancouver.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, I have to go back to work now, honey.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“Yup.”

“Bye.”

“Bye, mom.”

Tapping the screen of her phone, Debby slid it into the pocket of her scrub pants and sighed. She’d just finished washing up after helping scrub the instruments and putting them into the rack that would send them down to central sterile, but she knew there was another case coming once OR 7 had been set up. She wouldn’t get the chance to run down and see her husband in-between.

Washing her hands again because she’d touched her phone, Debby forced gloves over her damp skin with some effort and paced down the hall and into the room the next case would be in. Penny and Alyssa were already there, beginning to pull the instruments and supplies that Dr. Wolfe had ordered. They were setting up for staging and debulking ovarian cancer, and Dr. Rheiner was assisting. This fact wasn’t especially pleasing - she’d had to work with him only a few times before, and while all surgeons tended to be callous and impersonal, Dr. Rheiner was particularly cold.

“How’s Mike doing?” Alyssa queried as she brought in the linens for the surgical tables.

“He’ll live. Apparently he’s been chronically exposed to low doses of gamma radiation, so his supervisor made the call for him to have paid leave for a few weeks. The ED doc said to make sure he stays hydrated.”

“That’s all?”

“Apparently. If I remember when I get home I’ll check to see if there’s any food that’ll help him feel better. Maybe I’ll even be able to afford to buy it.” Debby couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice as she hung a bag of saline on the IV pole. “I’m leaning more and more towards just selling everything and moving back to Vancouver. My sister already said she’d help me out if it happens, it’s just such a hassle… but I don’t think I can let my husband keep being _poisoned_ at work.”

Alyssa offered a sympathetic expression, but didn’t reply, and they worked for the next few minutes in silence. As Debby was retrieving several kidney basins for specimen collection, she found her mind on her son. Once Kyle was eighteen, he might get a similar surgery, to remove his “female” reproductive organs. It was interesting that a procedure to save a patient’s life would also give her son the life he wanted.

Assuming being transgender wasn’t made to be completely illegal in the next four years.

 

“Hey, who else is off tomorrow?” Brendon asked, glancing around the room. “There’s enough cash in the pool, I was planning on a food run.”

“I can help,” Nick offered. “I think Oskar and John are off, too.”

“Just make sure you leave early, before Watterson shows up,” a worker whose name Brendon couldn’t remember warned. “I went out on the last one, and we left too late so he saw us swiping the truck. We had to come up with all kinds of bullshit reasons when we got back. I can’t believe he fell for it, though. We weren’t even in work clothes.”

There was a collective snicker throughout the group, along with some mutters about how thick the administrative supervisor was. Brendon shook his head, grinning and waiting for them to quiet again.

“Any special requests along with the usual stuff? Last week we got donuts, so something else.”

“Chocolate bars!”

“Skittles!”

Everyone started yelling at once, but it died down again after a moment.

“Hey, how about chips?” the last one called out, which was met with agreeable murmuring.

“Okay then, chips. We’ll grab a couple different flavors and maybe dip if there’s extra money. So it’ll be me, Oskar, John and Nick, right?”

“Yup,” John Varnham affirmed from the back of the room. “Hey, uh, we gotta be careful, though. The news lady said the weather’s gonna be shit tomorrow.”

 

After he’d got off the phone, Kyle flopped down onto his bed. It was just a twin-size mattress in the corner on the floor, but it was comfortable enough. Pushing his face into his pillow, he let himself start worrying again; about Zach, about his dad. About flying to Canada by himself and trying not to get lost in the airport terminal while he looked for his aunt.

Kyle didn’t know much about politics, only what his parents always bitched about to each other when they got home from work. Health insurance and budget cuts and gang violence and evil police officers. Or, when they thought he wasn’t listening, how the government was stomping out the last rights that trans people had.

 _Screw you, government,_ he thought, feeling bitter.

He didn’t know why the government hated him so much. Or anyone else, for that matter. Sometimes Kyle felt like the entire world was trying to crush him, to force him away from himself. Everything around him was getting stupider and stupider, but he always had at least fourteen hours’ worth of homework every night even though he had a hard time sleeping. His teachers always told him he was supposed to want something “realistic” for his life, even though he couldn’t imagine himself as anything but a professional hockey player. The government was trying to make him turn back into a girl, even though he’d known he was a boy since he was six years old and he couldn’t possibly go back now.

Rolling off his bed, Kyle pulled a mostly-full blue spiral notebook out of his backpack and flipped to the first empty page. It was supposed to be for school, but he would be in Canada soon and he knew his grandparents would buy him new notebooks for the next school year. Pulling a pen out with it, he sat cross-legged on the floor in a pile of dirty clothes as he scrawled the same sentence on every line:

_I am a hockey player._

Except for the last line of the last page.

_I am a boy._

 

No matter how much Alex tossed and turned, he just couldn’t fall asleep that night. He was exhausted and kept yawning silently in the dark, but his eyes didn’t want to stay closed and his brain wouldn’t settle. Somehow restlessness had settled into him a few hours ago, the same feeling he sometimes got before an especially gruesome car accident or gang shooting, and he found himself worrying that soon he’d be out on runs all night and then again tomorrow until he just collapsed from exhaustion.

Alex rolled onto his stomach, pulling the thin pillow over his head and sighing into the mattress. He tried to bore himself to sleep by remembering - his bunker gear was next to Engine 2, they’d filled all the SCBA tanks, they’d recently gotten in some more jugs of Class A foam. Ambulance 1 had a mostly-empty box of size medium gloves and an unopened one, and he’d packed together a few extra IV starter-kits because they used so many during a shift. Engine 4 was scheduled for maintenance soon.

Why wasn’t it working? Why couldn’t he sleep?

 

**_When the explosion occurred, none of them knew it._ **

**_Kyle was sleeping late._ **

**_Debby was in surgery._ **

**_Alex was on a call for an attempted suicide._ **

**_Brendon was paying for groceries with money pooled by the entire staff._ **

**_The rain was pouring buckets that morning; there was a hurricane nearby, close enough to make bad weather for them, but far enough not to put them in danger. Or so they thought._ **

**_The edge of the storm system moved close enough to Edmons-Drake that the wind had begun to pick up, which wouldn’t have been a problem if the roof over the turbine hall for reactor 2 hadn’t been leaking. This itself wouldn’t have been enough to cause damage if the engineer hadn’t decided to take an unscheduled break in order to call his girlfriend. The water pooled in a corner of the floor by the turbine, eventually penetrating into a cluster of electrical wires. A line of ordinary 12-gage solid copper had been fastened to one of the wood beams with a staple, and the electrician who’d installed it had pounded the staple down enough to cut into the rubber sheath and touch the black feed. The leak hit the wire and it began sparking, eventually catching fire inside the wall that separated the turbine hall from the reactor housing. Time constraints and material cost had kept the owners of the plant from adding a containment dome to the blueprints prior to construction, so the reactor housing was separated from the outside world by only a series of exterior walls._ **

**_The fire spread through the space between the interior wall and the exterior wall, eventually creating a weak point in the structure. When the winds, by that point having reached significant speed, tore down a pylon, it was pitched into the exterior wall over the reactor housing on exactly the section that had been weakened by the electrical fire. Damaged by the heat, the impact of the pylon and the force of the rain, the shell of the reactor cracked._ **

****


	4. When they lose consciousness.

“Weren’t we just there yesterday?” Ben grumbled from the driver’s seat as the ambulance hurtled up the road at full pelt, sirens howling.

“Yeah, for the guard who passed out,” Alex nodded. He was gripping the handle of the door so hard his knuckles were white - the rain was coming down in sheets and the wind nearly pushing the vehicle off the side of the highway into a ditch. “They called for all the departments in the state, though. Have you ever heard that?”

“Uh… no. Just the county, once, when that high school burned down. But never the whole state. Probably some power lines got knocked down or something.”

Alex frowned to himself but didn’t say anything. A few downed power lines wasn’t enough to mobilize thousands of firemen to a single location. He was too tired to really care, though. He hadn’t slept at all last night, even though there hadn’t been any calls until the morning when a teenager had tried to poison herself with Tylenol. Yawning widely, he slid his phone out of his pocket.

“What’s up?” Jake’s voice answered from the other end after a couple of rings.

“Hey, we’re on our way over right now. Did you grab my bunker gear? If there’s only a few patients I’ll still be able to help whatever it is that’s going on over there.”

“Yeah, we tossed your stuff into the empty seat, so when you’re done running back and forth in the rig you can join up with us. Hey, uh, did you hear that radio call too, or am I just losing my shit? I swear they called for everyone across the board.”

“No, that was real, man. Do we know what it is yet?”

“Nah, I haven’t heard shit about it yet. You’ll probably get there before us, right? So gimme a shout when you get there and it ends up not being a big deal.”

Alex snorted: “Yeah, okay. See you there.”

“Yup.”

“Hey, do you taste that?” Ben asked once he’d hung up.

“Taste what?”

“On the end of your tongue, like aluminum foil. Or if you licked a metal bar.”

“When did you lick a metal bar?” Alex smirked before realizing that yes, he could taste it. “Shit. It’s in my mouth, what is that?”

“I don’t know,” Ben shook his head. He slowed down as they were pulling up to the station. “And actually I’ve never licked a metal pole, but I think this is what it would taste like.”

Turning at a corner of one of the plant buildings, Alex’s eyes flew open and he instantly forgot his exhaustion when he saw the inferno eating at the roof of a different structure. The block beside it had an entire wall caved in with part of a power stack melted into it, and the intense light made his eyes hurt enough to look away. A group of at least ten plant workers were scrambling across the parking lot towards one of the main buildings, their faces obscured by respirators and some kind of instruments in hand.

“Fuck,” Alex breathed, barely able to comprehend the sight. “What’s that burning? I’ve never seen a fire like this.”

Before Ben could answer, a plant worker sprinted over to the ambulance, flapping his arms over his head for them to stop. The ambulance jerked to a halt and Alex jumped out to talk to the frantic man.

“Hey! Get back in the ambulance, you’ll get sick!”

“What!?!” Alex screamed - he only caught half the words over the raging storm and the howling sirens.

“Get back in the ambulance!” the worker repeated, stepping closer and bellowing through his gas mask. “Put something over your face! You’ll breathe in the radiation!”

Alex nodded, but only had a vague idea what the worker meant. He thought radiation only happened when a nuclear bomb went off. Even so, he climbed back into the ambulance and slammed the door, wiping rain from his hair and face. Even in those few seconds his clothes had become drenched.

“What’d he want?”

“He said to wear something on our faces, because of radiation.”

“Yeah, right,” Ben scoffed as he began driving again, taking them the last few yards to the entrance of the crumbling block. Several injured people were being gathered there. “In this shit-show? All we have are procedure masks, they’ll just be soaked and won’t help anyway.”

Climbing into the back, they stretched gloves over their hands and slipped the stretcher down to the pavement. Every step across the parking lot was a fight to keep their balance against the torrents, even though it was barely ten feet in total. Three other ambulance crews were already there, placing IVs and sorting out the worst injured. But it seemed like a dozen new casualties were arriving every second, carried by their compatriots.

“Hey!” Alex yelled, slapping another medic’s shoulder. “Who’s the most hurt?”

“Take him!”

The man jabbed a finger at a plant worker in a burnt uniform. Alex noticed that the paramedic’s glove had been torn open at the palm, but he didn’t say anything and went over to the plant worker.

The man’s wounds were horrific - his face and hands were cracked and bleeding, and where his clothes hadn’t been burned to his skin they were coated in vomit. He coughed roughly and looked at them as they were lifting him onto the stretcher, but even once they’d gotten him to the ambulance he’d completely lost consciousness.

“Christ on a crutch,” Alex muttered, locking the stretcher in place and pulling the back doors shut. “Ben, you gotta floor it, we’re already losing this guy.”

“I’ll try, but the storm’s still bad,” his partner called back.

As he cut away the uniform with scissors, Alex made a face as skin was pulled away with it and discolored blood began spattering the metal floor and his gloves. He’d been a firefighter since he’d gotten out of school, and a medic almost as long, but he’d never seen injuries this bad before. As he slipped an O2 mask onto the victim’s face he shook clumps of bloody hair from his fingers, and then discovered that there was nowhere to place an IV; the man’s skin was either charred or had been peeled off with his clothes. It was grotesque.

“Shit,” Alex hissed under his breath, struggling to find a vein in the plant worker’s thigh. Only once he’d accomplished this did he start attaching the EKG leads and the pulse oximeter. Tiny pieces of flesh stuck to his hands and he was forced to change them in the middle of stabilizing the man - they’d become too sticky to work otherwise.

Alex would never know it, but the simple act of removing the contaminated gloves probably helped save his life.

 

“What the hell is this?” John wondered from the passenger seat of the truck.

Brendon’s eyebrows scrunched together on his face, and all he could do was shake his head. Every two seconds they had to pull to the side to let a ridiculously long column of fire trucks and ambulances race by them, flashing lights reflecting off the slick surface of the highway and sirens incessantly whining. They would get back on the road again, only to get out of the way before they even hit the speed limit.

“It’s going to take us two fucking hours to get back if this keeps up,” Oskar spat impatiently.

“Knock it off,” Nick immediately rebuked the other man. “Bitching and moaning won’t help and we don’t want to hear it.”

Brendon couldn’t blame them for being cranky - if they took too long bringing back the groceries, the guys who came back on lunch break would give them a bunch of crap for it. Actually, he was feeling it a little, too.

“Hey, can you toss me something from back there?”

“Like food?”

He rolled his eyes: “No, a fucking football. Yes, food! Gimme one of those bags of chips or something.”

A green bag of sour cream and onion chips was dropped into his lap with a slight crunch. When he was forced to pull over for the two hundredth time he busied his hands opening it while another line of fire trucks screamed past, throwing water over the windshield. After a couple of minutes and several handfuls of chips, he was able to start driving again.

“How many of those damn trucks have gone by us so far?” John grumbled. “I feel like they should’ve run out by now.”

“Right? It looks like every fireman in the country is going that way,” Nick agreed.

“Do firemen eat donuts? If they were cops, I could understand this, because then we’d just know there’s a sale at Walmart where a twenty-four pack of powder sugars are on sale for twelve bucks,” Brendon sneered cynically.

“No, I don’t think they do,” Nick answered. “I’m pretty sure it’s just cops who eat donuts. Free dalmatian puppies?”

Brendon snorted; “Yeah, that could be it.”

He stopped in the shoulder again, reaching into the bag. As soon as they hit his tongue, though, he made a face and reflexively spat the chips out onto his pants before he’d even started chewing.

“Gross, man! Couldn’t you spit out the window or something?” John shouted.

“Fuck you, man! They taste like lead!”

“What now?” Oskar inquired, unstrapping himself so he could lean his head into the front of the cab.

“Taste this!” Brendon pointed the open end of the bag to him. “They were fine a few minutes ago, I don’t know what happened.”

The other three exchanged confused looks for a hesitant moment before reaching in for the chips. Unsurprisingly, they all had the same reaction.

“What the hell? This tastes like when I used to eat pennies as a kid,” Nick grimaced.

“Well that explains a lot,” John snickered, which he got punched in the arm for.

“I guess the bag must’ve got contaminated somehow,” Oskar shrugged.

“But they tasted like food before now,” Brendon insisted even as he turned back to the road and shifted the truck into drive. He shook his head. “Whatever. Just throw the fucking things away, and if someone doesn’t get any chips this week just tell them the store didn’t have enough.”

“The taste is still in my mouth, too,” Oskar complained as he threw the bag out the window, letting wind blast into the vehicle for a second before it closed.

Brendon was about to answer, but Nick spoke up first - “Hey, is it just me, or are all those trucks headed for the plant?”

“It kinda looks that way, doesn’t it?” John muttered.

There was a surprisingly long lull in the parade of emergency vehicles after that, and they arrived back at the power station about ten minutes later. Sure enough, the campus of Edmons-Drake was so clogged that they had to park before they even reached the first building, which would be a bitch when it came to carrying the food over, especially with the weather like this.

“We didn’t get anything that spoils, right?” Brendon asked, clipping the truck keys to his belt loop and releasing his seat belt.

“No, that was last week, the guys brought back eggs because Brad got an overtime bonus.”

He didn’t bother to pull up the hood of his rain jacket before getting out of the truck - it was made of cheap plastic and was ripped in several places anyway. The wind almost knocked him backwards and he was almost instantly soaked, but he managed to get across the parking lot to one of the firemen who was shouting into a radio.

“Hey! What’s going on!?!” he screamed.

“A fire!”

“No shit! Where is it, do you know!?!”

“On the roof! Get out of the way, we have more guys coming!”

Brendon growled to himself, jogging between the fire trucks towards the plant and wiping rain out of his eyes every few steps. Despite the sheets of water hammering down, he could smell something that he couldn’t identify - smoke, metal, ozone. The taste of lead in his mouth was only getting more unbearable with every step, and spitting wouldn’t clear it. But he completely forgot about it, if only for a minute, when he rounded the corner of the building. Several of his co-workers were rushing around in full-face respirators and rubber gloves, carrying more of the plant employees into the parking lot who wore burned clothes and were covered in injuries. Weaving around them, dozens of firefighters were rushing _in_ to the building with air tanks on their backs and long hoses in their hands.

Brendon didn’t even think about it - he ran inside too, finding the closest emergency locker. It took a few seconds to strip off his soaked clothing before he zipped himself into a light gray Tyvek suit in just his boxers and undershirt. As he yanked the straps of the respirator tight to his head he stuffed his feet into the black rubber boots, then pulled on the blue gloves and began running up the hall again.

He had to stop briefly to throw up - those chips must have been part of a really bad batch - but then pulled the respirator back on and kept moving. The stream of firemen was pouring into the turbine hall of reactor 2, so he just followed them, figuring he’d find out what was going on if he did.

Actually, just the opposite happened: the end of the turbine hall was engulfed in flames, and Brendon could only speculate what had actually caused this. It also seemed there was nothing he could do to help here, so he moved to the control room to find that the senior operator was unconscious at his work station. How this had happened, he couldn’t imagine, because nothing had fallen on the man.

It didn’t matter, though. Brendon carefully hoisted the other worker’s dead weight across his shoulders, holding an arm and a leg while struggling to stand upright. Once he had adjusted, he staggered out of the control room with his unconscious co-worker and began making his way out to where the EMTs were running back and forth with patients to the hospital.

Brendon found himself sniffing and snorting as his nose began running inside his mask, but it did no good. He could feel it running down his face and pursed his jaw. When it reached his chin and he breathed out, tiny droplets of something dark flew from the exhalation valve at the bottom of the respirator. He was so surprised to see this that he forgot to keep his lips closed. When it ran into his mouth, he realized that under his mask, his nose had started gushing with blood.

 

**_In the context of a nuclear explosion, be it from a weapon or a scientific process gone awry, there are three main types of radioactivity that people concern themselves with._ **

**_Alpha radiation consists of an alpha particle and a ray. This is the heaviest and largest radioactive particle, and can be stopped by almost any material. However, if ingested or inhaled, it is incredibly dangerous even in small doses. Alpha particles are an atom consisting of one proton and one neutron, and upon release help radioactive elements decay into a more stable element. As they are ionically positive, once inside the body of an organism, they steal electrons from it - this changes DNA and causes cell mutation. In humans, this almost always results in cancer._ **

**_Beta radiation is also composed of a particle and a ray, though in this case the particle is a high-speed electron. While smaller than an alpha particle, lead and some other materials are dense enough to stop beta radiation, as well as air respirator filters designed for CBRNE response. If a human is exposed to moderate or high levels of beta radiation, the particles will burrow to a certain depth in the skin, causing lesions that appear hours or days later. In severe cases, whole patches of skin will simply peel away._ **

**_Gamma radiation is only a ray of energy, which in the immediate is the most dangerous form, especially in high doses. In the context of other forms of radioactivity, it takes 37 inches (~94 centimeters) to stop 95% of gamma rays. In sufficient doses, gamma radiation destroys human chromosomes and bone marrow. They become unable to physically heal from the damage and usually die painfully within a month of acute exposure._ **

**_Approximately 400 rem (4 Sieverts) is accepted as the lethal dose of radiation exposure in humans. When this and similar doses are absorbed within a short time frame, the ensuing symptoms are classified under the medical term “acute radiation exposure” or “radiation toxicity.” The immediate symptoms that often occur are nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headache, abdominal pain and sudden nosebleeds. Often this is followed by a brief latency period, and the affected person will believe they are recovering even though the opposite will soon prove to be the case. Later the victim will suffer - among other symptoms - blood disorders (anemia, decreased white cell count, etc.), skin burns, impaired levels of consciousness/lucidity, infections, organ failure, and eventually death._ **

**_In rare cases, the exposure may be so high that the victim quickly loses consciousness. In such instances the person usually goes into cardiac/respiratory arrest and dies without ever waking up._ **

****


	5. When they run out of garbage bags.

Corporal Derek Bohr. _Corporal._ He’d been promoted last week, and was still smiling about it.

Well, except for right now. There wasn’t much to grin about when an every national guard unit in five states was receiving emergency CBRN training. It had been made very clear at the beginning that most of them would be in Tyvek suits and PAPRs evacuating people and decontaminating towns, but four platoons were being sent to an exploded nuclear reactor to smother it with dirt and dig up all the ground around the plant. And of course, the hurricane was still going on in that area. Perfect.

“We’re going to set up a cordon for ten miles around Edmons-Drake,” the officer briefing them was saying, pointing to a tactical map on the smart-screen. “Every road in the area will be blocked, to prevent civilians from entering the contaminated area. Once the evacuation is complete, we’ll begin decontamination procedures.” The officer flicked his finger and the screen pulled up an image of the main entrance to a somewhat old-looking institutional building. “Additionally, because the number of radiation injuries has been so high, St Thomas High School will be used as a temporary treatment facility to relieve the pressure from local hospitals. Hospital staff will _not_ be evacuated.”

 

“Hey, so, we have work to do,” Casey Simmons shouted from the back of the room, his face written with impatience. “Can you get on with it?”

Dr. Wolfe scowled. He’d called all the OR staff into the outer hall by their break room and the staff locker rooms, except for Dr. Callahan and the three people assisting him. The only reason Dr. Wolfe could get away with this in the middle of a workday was because he was the director of the surgical department, and Debby had a strong feeling he wouldn’t have pulled them out here without a good reason.

“Guys, please, quiet down,” Dr. Wolfe insisted. “Okay, so look, I got called by one of the hospital admins, and apparently the national guard is deploying because of the hurricane a few miles over. It’s not close enough to seriously affect us, but they’re evacuating pretty much everyone who doesn’t work here at the hospital. The other thing is they’re setting up in the high school because there was some kind of accident and there’s too many patients for us to handle and the next nearest hospitals are already full. We’re supposed to all take showers as soon as we can and put on clean scrubs, and even if you’re not on the sterile field you need to wear a procedure mask and two pairs of exam gloves at all times. Even if you have no patient contact, change your PPE every hour and wash your hands thoroughly.”

“Why? What’s going on?” several people started demanding, but were quieted again fairly quickly.

“Look, that’s all I was told,” Dr. Wolfe shouted in a frustrated tone. He was clearly losing his patience with them, but using it to bury his own growing panic. “There was an accident somewhere because of the storm, and the rain is sticking some kind of contamination down on us. Just wear the PPE, and don’t go outside. All the scheduled procedures have been cancelled until further notice because those patients will be evacuated, so the only surgeries will be on an emergency basis, and if you’re needed for one you’ll get paged by me or Dr. Rheiner. Otherwise, most of us are going to the ED or the ICU to help with the patient overload. Try to keep patients in their rooms and away from windows, and if you have to actually touch them, use sterile gloves and wear an isolation gown. Deb, Casey, Alyssa, I need you three to go see the hazmat guy, he needs nurses to help him with something.”

Dr. Wolfe let them go after that, and Debby obediently gathered her PPE. With a procedure mask tied to her face and two neoprene gloves on each hand, she and her compatriots left the surgical wing and rode the elevator down to the basement where the building services office was located. The hazmat guy actually did have his own office - everyone called him Matt, but she didn’t know him or his last name - and when they found it, he was frantically throwing random objects around in it, creating a pile behind his desk. Casey uncertainly knocked on the side of the open door and Matt looked up at them; he was already wearing some kind of gas mask with a pair of old, dirty goggles.

“You guys are from nursing? Great. Just gimme a second, I need to find…” He didn’t let them talk or even finish his sentence, still digging through his things until he came up with an energy drink. Debby had heard that this man was weird and eccentric, but she’d had no idea how much until this moment as she watched him rip off his gas mask, chug the entire Red Bull without taking a breath, and then pull it back up over his chin. “We have to take radiation measurements on patients and collect samples on the ones who are contaminated. I’m going to put you each in a hazmat suit with a PAPR, and we’re going to go around and check everything. The whole hospital is probably contaminated with radiation by now, so while you’re checking the patients, I’ll be checking the rooms. Try not to touch anything unless you’re taking a sample, otherwise your gloves could throw the meter off. Each patient needs a skin swab and a vial of blood taken if they make the Geiger counter go off, otherwise their name gets put into the computer to be evacuated.”

This amounted to Matt dressing them in yellow plastic coveralls with a clear visor over their faces. A hose attached to it and ran down to a battery-powered air purifier in the small of their backs, while tall booties and thick green rubber gloves were duct taped to the suits. Each of them was handed a clunky Geiger counter that had probably been built in the 1970s.

“Okay, here’s what needs to happen. I’m going to take the room measurement first. If the room is too radioactive, the patients are automatically contaminated. If the room is more or less clean, you’ll measure the patients. If the needle hits the number five on the gauge, or goes over it, the patient is contaminated. Set the little black dial to where it says .1x.”

With four clicks, all the instruments were turned on - and immediately started screaming. Behind his visor, Matt made a confused expression, turning his Geiger counter off and then back on. He twisted the dial again, but the thing still sounded like a machine gun. On the third twist it calmed down, but only a little.

“What’s going on?” Debby couldn’t help but ask.

“Everyone needs to get out of this hospital, because without hazmat suits like we’re wearing, they’ll be exposed to a lethal dose in less than ten days.”

 

Alex had been dead on his feet all day until now, but by the 30th straight hour he’d been awake, he was starting to wish he was _actually_ dead.

The merciful thing was that the army had finally showed up and were burying the reactor themselves to suffocate the fire, which meant the emergency responders could leave. The downside came, though, when the majority of the firemen and medics had started puking, their skin turning red, their noses bleeding. So the EMTs, many of them also suffering these symptoms, were now forced to drive their colleagues to the hospital, which was already overfilled with patients. They’d been told to wear their SCBAs to handle these patients, they were radioactive, but half of them didn’t have one to begin with and by now there was nobody left to refill the tanks with compressed air.

Alex and Ben had been able to get through to one of the military officers: “All you guys have your rubber suits, but we’re hauling our asses back and forth with dust masks.” “I’m not authorized to issue military equipment to civilians.” “So we’re supposed to just die because you don’t have the right paperwork?” He was a soldier, but he was also still a human being, so he’d very quietly passed along two spare masks with filters for them to use that he could conveniently “lose track of.”

That was several hours ago. For every second of those several hours, Alex had been dragging other firemen to the hospital’s emergency department, even though all the cubicles were full and the patients were just being put out in the back hall at this point, some on beds that hadn’t been properly cleaned or were broken because they had no other choice. And it wasn’t helping at all that his face seemed to be stretching in every direction at once by the rubber and the straps were cutting into his scalp.

“Are your hands cracking?” Ben asked. They were driving back to Edmons-Drake again, to collect the last victims. “My palms are finally scabbing over, but they were bleeding a few minutes ago.”

“No, but I have blisters on my fingers. I’ve never had any this bad, even back when I could afford to buy new boots and break them in for a few weeks.”

“Does radiation do this?” his partner wondered, the slightest note of worry in his tone.

Alex just shrugged without answering. He didn’t know anything about radiation except what he’d learned in school about Hiroshima, and even that he barely remembered. But given the patients they’d been bussing so far, if that was caused by radiation, he didn’t want to think about it. Of course, he and Ben had never entered the plant, so maybe they hadn’t caught any rays. Besides, he was wearing a gas mask, and before the mask he’d worn his SCBA for a couple of hours. So he was probably fine. He probably just got blisters from wearing gloves too long and having sweaty hands.

Probably. He would _probably_ be okay.

 

Derek snapped to attention and saluted mid-scrub when Lieutenant Croyle paced over to his corner of the high school gym.

“At ease, corporal. What’s your current reading?”

“We’ve managed to reduce contamination levels by sixty percent, sir, but for the last thirty minutes the meters have been holding at twenty milliroentgen per hour. Other rooms have lower levels of contamination, and those in the center of the building on the second floor have been brought down to roughly acceptable levels. But the entire third floor is so contaminated that we’d take the maximum allowed dosage in less than an hour.”

They had to scream through their hoods to hear each other - their personal radios had suddenly stopped working shortly after they’d arrived, so until replacements were issued they’d have to deal with the noise of their PAPRs as best they could. Even at the very top of their lungs, they could only just barely understand each other.

“Unfortunately that’s not surprising,” Croyle admitted. “The brass warned us that significant fallout could be coming down with the rain. When you’re finished with this round of decon, seal off the third floor by closing the fire doors in the stairwells and then cover them in plastic sheeting. Report once it’s done.”

“Yes, sir.”

Derek went back to where he’d been rinsing the wall with a flat-headed mop. All of their decon gel had been sent straight to the troops working on the reactor site, so until the next shipment arrived they had to clean everything the old-fashioned (and often ineffective) way. Soap could only do so much against nuclear waste.

And of course it was wasteful too; every few hours each soldier and his gear was measured, and half the time they had to strip naked, throw everything away, shower and then get replacements. They were burning through Tyvek suits and tactical uniforms like crazy, and had made him throw away the wristwatch his dad had given him when he’d graduated from AIT. It was starting to happen less often, though. None of them had gone outside and they’d made significant progress to scrub the interior of the school; in some places the paint had been totally dissolved from the walls and there were pot holes in the floor wax.

Derek held out the wand of his Geiger counter to check the wall - 20 mR per hour. The floor - 21 mR per hour. Clearly they weren’t going to get it any cleaner, so his squad started unrolling plastic sheeting across the gym floor and securing it every foot or so with duct tape. After three hours and two layers, he measured again, and the exposure rate had been cut in half at the floor level. They had to cover the walls too, but only managed to tape up the first layer on two and a half of them before running out of plastic, so that was added to the ever-growing list of things they were waiting for now.

“Fuck me,” Private Collins was muttering to someone else. “How much more radiation can there be? We’ve washed this place like twenty times or something.”

“Watch your language, soldier,” First Sergeant Kidd barked.

Derek snorted quietly but didn’t say anything. Really, he was just happy he could hear normally again; once they’d put down the sheeting across the floor and the meter had dropped below 20, they’d figured it was safe enough and had stopped wearing their PAPRs. He and a few others had even unzipped their suits and tied the sleeves around their waists because it was more comfortable. It had gotten dark several hours ago and it was still pouring buckets outside, but somehow the inside of the building managed to be like an oven. Even Lieutenant Croyle had stopped chewing them about uniform standards pretty quickly.

The medics were already setting up a makeshift triage in the corner that was furthest back, where the walls and floor were adequately covered in plastic. Cots and IV poles were floating around randomly in the space, with trash bags and disposable sheets covering everything to protect it from contamination. In the absence of privacy screens, tarpaulins were being hung with nylon ropes to make individual cubicles for patients.

The medics were all scurrying between the tarps arranging their things. Many of them were already wearing booties, isolation gowns and surgical masks, even though there wasn’t a single patient yet. Some had even put on sterile gloves with an additional pair of exam gloves over them, taped shut at the cuffs, or chemical splash goggles and paper N95 respirators. Derek didn’t really understand why they were so worked up. Most of the radiation had been washed away, and the way he understood radiation was that it was really only dangerous if you breathed in the dust or it got into your food. They’d put down an absurd amount of plastic sheets and there was no food here, so there shouldn’t be a problem.

He didn’t like standing still, though, so even though he was tired and there would be a good hour until the supplies got in, he jogged across the floor.

“Hey, you guys need help?”

“Sure, every six feet set up a cot and an IV pole. Make sure they’re covered, though. What’s your name?”

“Derek Bohr, corporal, 2nd squad 3rd platoon.”

“Ditch that suit, corporal. See how we’re dressed, in precaution gear? It’s all clean stuff from sealed boxes, but you’ve been working in that, right? We need everything clean. Wipe the soles of your boots, too. We have Dispatch wipes in cans over on that desk.”

“Yes, sergeant.”

Derek tossed his Tyvek suit next to the wall almost where the plastic ended, knowing it wasn’t dirty enough to throw out and that they’d make him wear it again once the rolls of plastic arrived. Dumping his cumbersome PAPR on top of it, he briefly ran a cleansing wipe over his combat boots as he’d been instructed before pulling the covers over them. They made him wear the thin disposable smock and two pairs of gloves, but at least he only had to wear a procedure mask and they didn’t have any goggles for him.

While Derek was tediously placing the cots and taping garbage bags over them, the tarpaulins were steadily being hung around them. Briefly the makeshift coverings would get lifted from the IV poles so that saline bags could get hung on them, and they had more than plenty of those to go around, but there were only enough blood pressure cuffs for every third cubicle. There didn’t seem to be very many oxygen tanks either, but he didn’t think they’d need those as much.

Once all the cots had been set up, he had to tape one of the flimsy plastic masks and a coil of thin tubing (still in the bags, of course) to each tank and then put it into a garbage bag, tying off the top… until they ran out of garbage bags.

_Really?_

  
**_The United States’ armed forces have not been prepared for CBRN events on a large scale since the Cold War. Despite massively inflated military spending from the government, which has been increased every year, most of their equipment and information is outdated. A significant portion of the money is actually funneled into contractors, and the individual equipment for soldiers has essentially stagnated. Most of the decon equipment in National Guard warehouses is five years out of date on average, and has not been inspected. There is no guarantee that any of it is still viable._ **

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The hazmat guy, Matt, is actually a "cameo" made by my boyfriend, who is named Matt and is the hazmat guy at the hospital. And he really is that weird :)
> 
> Decon gel, Tyvek and Dispatch are real, trademarked products and are not my creations. Please don't sue me.


	6. When they need water.

“Why isn’t mom coming with us?” Kyle asked as he and his dad were climbing into the pickup truck.

“She has to stay at work,” Mike answered vaguely.

Kyle made a face, but figured something was going on. More fire trucks than he’d ever seen before in his life had been speeding down the highway by their house yesterday, and today it was the army. At least the airport was in the other direction, his dad had said while they were packing, so they wouldn’t get stuck behind all those Hummers. Even weirder, though, flocks of helicopters were going the same way, buzzing through the sky constantly like a never-ending hive of angry wasps.

They tossed their things into the back seat of the cab and then Mike started driving. Kyle only had two bags, and his dad only had one. Their passports were in their pockets and he’d seen his dad stuffing all the cash they had into his wallet. He didn’t know why, but instead of anything else about today, that was the thing that had scared him. His parents were really careful with money, only buying him new clothes if he’d really outgrown them and maybe two presents for his birthday (none at any other time). But now his dad was taking all of it. Wouldn’t his mom need some of it, too?

For some reason, too, Mike hadn’t let him pack any clothes. So his two old backpacks were stuffed with his Xbox, both the controllers and all the cables for it, all the games he had, his laptop and copies of his prescriptions - Paxil for anxiety, and his testosterone. The only piece of clothing he’d taken was his Canucks jersey, which his grandparents had gotten for him the last time he’d been with them. They’d bought it in an adult medium size so that he couldn’t outgrow it, and he proudly wore it at every opportunity.

Kyle would normally listen to his iPod during the hour-long drive to the airport, but today he didn’t because it might stop him from figuring out what was happening. His dad was quiet, and his expression was eerie and unreadable.

“Why can’t we bring clothes?”

“We just can’t. When we get to your aunt’s house, you have to throw away your shoes, too.”

“But they still fit.

“I know. But we have to throw them away.”

There was silence again after that, and the next clue didn’t come until twenty minutes later when they were forced to stop at a military roadblock that hadn’t been there before. Mike climbed out, and Kyle watched from the cab. The soldier was wearing a gas mask, and he couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, but it felt like it was taking forever. Eventually the army man shook his head, and then Kyle’s dad pulled out a fistful of cash. The trooper glanced around, then took it in a hurry and nodded. Mike got back into the truck without a word, and they were allowed to drive through.

“What was that?” Kyle asked once they were far away from the checkpoint.

“Nothing, don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you about it later.”

This only worried him more. Normally his parents were pretty honest with him, but now they wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t see it until later, but there was nobody saying anything about it. Nobody in the outside world knew what was going on, either, and that was the most terrifying thing of all.

 

The saddest thing Debby saw that morning was the paramedics.

She and several other staff members were working in hazmat suits and the loud air filters on their backs, but there weren’t enough of them, so everyone else was wrapped up in the heaviest surgical gowns, with gloves and the “duck-billed” N95 masks that were often used for Tuberculosis cases.

But the EMTs were in their normal uniforms and boots, with exam gloves and procedure masks. A few of them wore nothing over their faces at all, or had wrapped gauze bandages over their noses and mouths in desperation. The two who were best off had military gas masks, but they were the only ones.

And it showed. More than half of them were visibly sick with more “mild” versions of the symptoms their patients were suffering from. Often it was lesions and boils on their arms and hands, or their noses and gums were bleeding uncontrollably. She’d seen two or three of them come in, vomit into the nearest trash can or hazmat bin, and then put their mask back on before returning to work. One of them had swapped out the cotton balls in his ears, which he’d stuffed in after they, too, had started bleeding. That particular man had been stopped by one of the doctors and put out in the back hall with a saline drip, but they’d run out of stretchers and beds last night, so he’d been forced to lay down on the floor with just a sheet under him.

By 7:00, the medics had stopped bringing in injured firemen and had all been ordered into the hospital themselves, and at precisely 7:30 national guard soldiers cocooned in heavy suits with air tanks began evacuating patients. Behind the nurses’ station Debby had glanced at one of the computer screens showing the security cameras, and she saw the troops washing down their trucks with some kind of white foam.

“Someone made fresh coffee,” one of the ED nurses told her in a low voice. “You look tired, have you been up all night?”

“Since yesterday morning,” Debby nodded. “Thanks.”

The soldiers had ordered them on no uncertain terms not to eat or drink anything because of the radiation, but that was impossible. Nurses without coffee were about as useful as a ski slope made out of gravel. After checking to make sure none of the troopers were looking as they bustled in and out with patients on military stretchers, Debby went to the break room to hopefully gulp down a cup of coffee without everything going to hell.

 

Apparently the floodgates had opened sometime after his platoon’s shift had ended, because when Derek and his compatriots returned to St Thomas the next afternoon both of the floors they’d decontaminated were packed with hospital patients waiting to be evacuated. Many of them were the critical-care cases who’d been in the local hospitals before the accident and hadn’t been contaminated, and they were on the second floor because it was still less radioactive than the first floor. The first floor was occupied by the staff from the power plant, and not all of them had arrived yet because they’d run out of space in the school. The patients who were the worst off were put in classrooms, while the ones who weren’t as sick were kept in the gym. But this was only relative - very few of these patients could even sit up on their own, and at least three had died in transit that he knew of.

Derek only had the rudimentary skills he’d picked up in basic training and wasn’t a field medic, but he was still involved in the care process. He and each of his squad-mates had been assigned a section to patrol, so until he was relieved tomorrow morning he would be endlessly pacing through two columns of makeshift cubicles in the gym. That way if a patient needed something or had a question he might be able to help, and if it was beyond his scope he could call over one of the medics. But it also felt absurd to him. He was wrapped up in a thick plastic coverall with just his underwear beneath it, and then everything doctors wore during a major surgery over it. This was severely mismatched with his military full-face respirator and the tactical M4 assault rifle slung across his back.

At least he wasn’t part of 1st squad, though. They were ordered to march in a constant loop around the outside of the building and clean it with decon gel. They’d coat an exterior wall with the stuff, peel it off, and move to the next one to repeat the process.

Derek’s feet made the plastic crinkle every time he took a step, and as he glanced into each cubicle in his slow pace he made a mental note of which ones were awake, which ones were sleeping; thankfully most of them weren’t conscious right now, because that meant less of them would be asking him stupid questions. This hope was dashed when he passed the next cot, though, and the patient raised his head and one arm. He was covered in discolored gauze bandages, some encrusted in dried pus, and when he started yelling through his oxygen mask blood dribbled into the bag at its bottom.

“Hey, hey! Hey doc, can you come talk to me a little?”

“I’m not a medic, I’m a corporal. I have to patrol,” Derek argued, not wanting to get close to the man.

“I just want to know what’s going on, they’re keeping me away from everyone. Nobody ever comes in but I need water, I just want to get the taste out of my mouth.”

“We’re not allowed to go near you,” he lied. This wasn’t strictly true, but it certainly wasn’t encouraged for obvious reasons, and this patient’s bed had clear plastic curtains around it even within the cubicle. There was even a barrier sheet over top of it as well, and the floor around the bed had basins and absorbent microfiber squares to keep body fluids from pooling up and spreading contamination. “I’m not supposed to go in, you’re dangerously radioactive.”

“Please,” the man begged.

Derek sighed through his mask: “I’ll ask the medics, they’ll bring you some water.”

Without waiting for an answer, he walked away from the cubicle and completed his current patrol before heading for the corner where the medics’ tables were located. Predictably, none of them were there, likely off resuscitating one of their problem patients for the hundredth time. Derek knew he could probably just blow the man off and get back to work, but the guy was probably about to die anyway, and all he wanted was water. It shouldn’t be a big deal, really. In spite of his reluctance to do so, he dug around in the crates until he found some. It was marked as sterile purified water for surgical irrigation, but if it was purified and sterile it would probably be fine to drink even for a sick patient.

He hesitated for a moment before pushing the thick curtain aside and going in, forcing himself to swallow his nervousness. He was in a suit, he had a mask. The radiation couldn’t hurt him through military-grade CBRN filters. There was nothing to use as a container, so he just entered the clear containment screen and started unscrewing the cap.

“I know I’m a hazard for others,” the man admitted. His voice was a pained wheeze. “You don’t run around an exploded reactor for two hours and be fine after. They put me in the hospital when my nose and mouth wouldn’t stop bleeding… and then my ears, too…”

“Just rest,” Derek choked out, feeling nauseous when the patient pulled down his oxygen mask and shreds of his face came off with it. “We’re going to get you out of the radiation zone, to a clean hospital. They’ll help you.”

As the bottle was accepted from his hands, the response was a bitter chuckle.

“I know everything about this.” A brief pause for a sip of water. “But that won’t save me. The important thing to know… being smart makes no difference, we’ll die the same way, whether it’s me with such a high IQ or some idiot who turned valves in the turbine hall for a living. They just won’t know what’s happening. They’ll think they can get better for a while…”

Even though the patient clearly didn’t care about his fate and had accepted it, the statement was terrifying to the young soldier.

“What’s your name?” he asked, wanting to switch away from this topic.

“Rob,” the man answered, handing back the bottle of water. It was smeared with blood from his hands. “Robert Noah.”

“I’m Derek Bohr,” he returned, carefully sliding the oxygen mask back up.

“Thank you, Derek Bohr.”

“It’s just water.”

Rob offered a weak smile: “You said you’re not a doctor, just a corporal… but you’ve already shown me more kindness than any of the doctors have since the accident. So… thank you… for treating me like a human being.”

And an instant later, Derek burst out of the cubicle, almost ripping down the curtain and taking off his mask so he could scream louder: “MEDIC! MEDIC! WE HAVE A CODE OVER HERE!”

 

Brendon could hear the shouting and running around nearby, but he didn’t care. His brain was consumed with the fact that the only reason he’d stopped puking all over himself is because there wasn’t a drop of moisture left in his body. He’d had painful diarrhea earlier too, right around when the vomiting started, but that had stopped by now as well. Once the army doctors had situated him in the temporary holding at the school, he’d pulled out his IV on purpose because he didn’t want it to start again.

Every so often a soldier would pass by, but nobody had actually checked on him since he’d gotten here. He was exhausted and had a pounding headache, but was too uncomfortable to sleep. If anyone ever came to look him over, he’d ask for more painkillers and something to wipe his nose with. It would gush with blood every few minutes, then stop on its own, only to start again. He’d tried wiping it away with his hand until the skin on his fingers had peeled off, and his hand had been sticky with dried blood ever since then.

The noise in one of the nearby cubicles died out as suddenly as it had started, and shortly following two soldiers passed by carrying a body bag. Neither of them spared him a glance; they were perfectly indifferent to his suffering.

 _Yeah, fuck you too,_ Brendon thought to himself. He was almost disgusted with them, actually. Even knowing they had orders not to come near the patients because of the contamination, if he saw them bleeding from random places and in pain, he would probably stop and help them.

Brendon felt like he was about to throw up again, so he rolled onto his side with an agonized groan and tried to aim for the bucket on the floor. He didn’t puke, but instead lost his balance and went crashing down onto the plastic floor covers. After landing on his skinless hand and feeling blood leaking out of his gums, he couldn’t help but yell in surprise and pain. Maybe that should’ve sent someone running to investigate, but it seemed like a lifetime before one of the soldiers arrived.

“You can’t get up from the cot, you’re too weak,” the army doctor scolded him in a condescending tone even while helping him up.

“It was an accident,” Brendon protested after swallowing a mouthful of coppery blood. “I fell.” He was set back onto the uncomfortable bed. “I need painkillers. I have a headache.”

“You can’t have anymore,” the doctor replied. His voice was completely dismissive of the idea. “There’s painkillers in your fluid line.”

The IV needle was stabbed back into his wrist and the soldier left without another word.

 

**_Though there have been relatively few radiological accidents since the technology was discovered and refined, when they did happen they were usually well-documented. Some, like the Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania and the Fukushima-Daiichi accident in Japan, resulted in very few (if any) casualties and manageable contamination. Others, such as the Idaho Falls disaster in the US, as well as the Kyshtym and Chernobyl catastrophes in the former USSR, released dangerous levels of radioactive materials into the environment and caused significant loss of resources and human lives._ **

**_In the case of the explosion at the V. I. Lenin atomic power station in the Chernobyl region, many of the worst instances of acute radiation poisoning in history were recorded. Nearly all of the staff operating the number 4 reactor, as well as the entire fire brigade from the nearby town of Pripyat, died almost immediately after exposure in painful and horrifying ways._ **

**_Aleksandr Akimov, the shift operator at the time, died two weeks afterwards in a hospital in Moscow. The doctors could only find a single spot on his back that wasn’t radioactive, and were reported to have said, “In order to fix him, we’d need a whole other body.”_ **

**_Vasily Ignatenko, a senior sergeant in Pripyat’s fire brigade, died eighteen days after being admitted to the hospital in Moscow. In the last two days of his life, pieces of his internal organs began rising into his throat and choking him._ **

**_Vladimir Pravik, a lieutenant in Pripyat’s fire brigade, died two weeks after the accident in the Moscow hospital. It is said that he received so much radiation that his eyes, formerly brown, turned blue._ **

****


	7. When there is no safety.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING! References to sexual assault and suicide at the end of the chapter.

“So what’s on?” Kyle asked, plunking down on the couch next to his cousin Jared.

“Godzilla versus Sharknado four.”

“Anything else?”

Jared shook his head: “Nah, there’s nothing good on Netflix this month.” Then his cousin gave him a nervous glance. “Hey, um, it’s safe for me to sit near you, right?”

Kyle made a face and shoved him, only half-friendly about it. “Come on, dude, I showered like three times and my dad made me throw away all my clothes.”

“Okay, if you’re sure. There was all kinds of crap on Twitter talking about a huge spike in radiation that came from America. Isn’t that why you came to be with us anyway?”

“I was already going to, they’re making it illegal to be trans. Nobody was even talking about radiation until we landed here. My dad said they’ll never admit it or tell us anything, but mom’s still there working.”

“They really don’t say anything? Radiation is dangerous, dude. They have to say _something_ about it.”

“Remember when I was ten and you were twelve, and you guys came to visit us during the summer that time?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, remember how you were kept up all night because you could hear all the guns going off?”

“Uh… yeah. So?” Jared repeated, but he sounded a little less stubborn.

“Dude, that’s _normal_ for us. There’s a Kevlar plate in my school backpack. The government never does anything for us over there.”

“That sucks. So you’re just scared all the time?”

“Not really,” Kyle answered, and was surprised because he meant it. “After a while you stop thinking about it, I guess.”

“Well, um, I have a lacrosse game tomorrow. You don’t have to wear armor to go to it if you want to come watch.”

Kyle nodded, looking back at the stupid movie that was playing. He probably would go to his cousin’s game, actually. Maybe it would help him feel normal again.

 

Derek’s stomach clenched as he walked over to the medics’ makeshift station, but he knew if he put this off he’d probably regret it more. But when he arrived at the series of folding tables with a final rustling crunch on the plastic floor and the two other soldiers looked up at him, he still couldn’t swallow his guilt.

They were in heavy surgical gowns over their thick plastic coveralls, but they’d messily scrawled their ranks and last names across their chests in Sharpie: “Corporal Yates.”

Yates looked up through the visor of his SCBA mask at the sound of his name. “Corporal Bohr. Do you need something? I thought your squad is on fire watch.”

Derek ignored the medic’s sarcasm.

“I just need a second. I wanted to ask about… the patient who coded yesterday night at 18:53. He was way in the back, one of the guys from the plant.”

“Oh, yeah. Robert…” Yates flipped through one of the scattered notebooks briefly. “Noah. What about him? I thought you’re the one who called the code on him.”

“Well, see, here’s the thing,” Derek admitted. “I was on patrol and he asked me for water. I came here to talk to you guys about it, but there was nobody. So I brought him some, it was in a bottle that said it was sterile… but he coded right after he drank it. Did I… did I kill him? He just wanted some water.”

The medic snorted through his mask.

“You’re kidding, right? The guy took almost two thousand rems, it would’ve been better if he just died on the spot at the plant. If the water really was sterile, it wouldn’t have done anything to him. Hell, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference even if the shit was full of anthrax, he was already dead. You were just unlucky that you’re the one who saw him code.”

“Okay then.” Somehow, though, he still felt like he’d failed that patient. Then he remembered he _wasn’t_ the one who’d failed, and couldn’t keep an angry expression from poisoning his features. “So why wasn’t anyone here? He said nobody would bring him water, and he was just left alone to rot in that plastic box.”

“Feel free to get back to work, Bohr. I know you have better things to do right now, otherwise I’ll report your ass to the lieutenant.”

Derek almost took a step back, feeling like he’d been suddenly punched in the face. Sure, he hadn’t really given a shit yesterday, and before he’d just been annoyed at the strain of such a massive flood of radiation victims. But that patient couldn’t have been much older than Derek, and the fact that nobody would even stop to give him something to drink when he was literally on the edge of death was disgusting.

But picking fights with a stubborn medic wouldn’t change it, so through his crushing sense of injustice he had enough self-control to walk away and go back to his patrol route. Rob’s last words kept echoing inside his head with every step he took.

_“Thank you for treating me like a human being.”_

So this time, he pulled down his hood and let his respirator dangle from his neck by the strap. He wasn’t afraid of them anymore, he realized, and on his first patrol he went into every single cubicle, and then the inner plastic curtains, too.

“Hi, I’m Corporal Bohr, I patrol this area. I’ll be here all night every night until you leave. If you need anything, just ask me, and I’ll help you.”

 

Brendon just stared at the soldier for a second, eyebrows raised. But even radiation poisoning couldn’t keep him from sarcasm.

“Yeah, I’d like some filet mignon and your best wine. Just leave the bottle, I could sure fucking use it…”

Corporal Bohr snorted, giving a slight grin and shaking his head.

“Our CBRN instructor told us there was a long-running myth that alcohol gets radioactive shit out of your body, but it actually makes you feel worse. You just end up puking more.”

“Man, I’ve been doing too much of that already. Don’t you guys have any Dramamine? I could use a nap, too. God damn, I haven’t slept in forever…”

Brendon interrupted himself with a rough cough, and spat a mouthful of blood into the bucket on the floor. It hadn’t come from his lungs; his mouth was just always bleeding now, as was his nose. A few hours ago he’d been given a transfusion, but it didn’t seem like it helped any.

“So what’s it like over there?” the corporal asked casually, sitting on the foot of his cot.

“Um… well, I was on a grocery run when it happened. But when we got there it was already burning to the fucking ground. I ran in to help, and one of the guys was still in the control room and he just passed out. I heard he died a few hours after, too. But… it’s a lot of heat, at least inside the building. Maybe that’s radiation, but it was probably the fire. And I still can’t get the metal taste out of my mouth. It just sort of happened while I was eating chips on the drive back, and I thought the chips were bad, but then I saw Rob in the hospital after and he said that’s what happens when you take too many rem. So I guess I’ll grow a tail or something now.”

Bohr suddenly looked like he’d been choked, and all the humor drained from his face.

“Rob… Noah?”

“Yeah, how’d you guess? Did you know him before this?”

“I… no. He died yesterday night. I had to call the code on him,” the soldier half-whispered. “I just… you know what, it’s not important. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting on a tail if I was you.” Bohr shook himself and forced a smile. “Anyway, like I said, you need anything just yell.”

 

_Kyle was gone._

_Zach had gotten the text from his friend that afternoon, saying his friend had landed safely in Canada and was with his family. He didn’t know when he’d come back to the US, if he ever did._

_Part of him was happy. He wanted Kyle to be somewhere safe, not like him. He was still at his house, his mom at work and his dad downstairs. Some army guy had showed up about an hour ago to tell them they’d be evacuated soon, probably for a couple weeks. But Zach didn’t care. Nothing in the world mattered, because with Kyle gone he’d taken a chance._

_It had gone horribly wrong._

Dad, I need to tell you something.

Sure, Kait. What’s up?

 _A deep breath:_ Dad, I wanted to tell you about this for a long time, but I was scared to. I always felt like… like I’m supposed to be a boy, and that I’m supposed to date girls. Please don’t be made at me.

_Silence._

Dad? Say something.

_Silence._

Dad…

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS RIGHT NOW?!

 _Staggering backwards and crying._ Dad I’m so sorry, please don’t be mad at me!

The army fucking shows up saying that they’re going to haul us off someplace, and now you come down to tell me you’re a fucking dyke?! C’mere, C’MERE YOU LITTLE SHIT! Now understand this!

_He’s grabbed, his pants yanked down, and he screams at the fingers… they hurt so much, but it’s also the shame that makes him start crying even harder._

There! You FUCKING feel that?! That means you’re a girl! You’re a fucking girl and you’re supposed to date fucking boys! Get it through your thick fucking skull!

_Now, Zach was curled up in the corner of his bedroom, knees under his chin with the lights off. It still hurts down there, and he’s still crying, because he can never undo what his dad has done to him. Snorting hard and then swallowing a huge ball of snot that formed in his throat, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and started typing with shaking hands. When the message was sent, he turned on his light long enough to scrawl across a sheet of notebook paper and tapes it to the outside of his bedroom door. The apartment building was high enough._

_Zach climbed out his window and onto the rusty fire escape. All he needed to do was get to the roof, because the roof was high enough, and he knew it._

  
**_Due to the oppressive nature of the United States government, the average suicide rate in the LGBT+ community is around 56.2% nationally at the time of the most recent survey. Between subgroups of this community, they can range as low as 20.7% to as high as 61.8% (the transgender subgroup). Reasons for suicide vary, though the most common reasons are fear, discrimination, verbal/emotional/physical/sexual abuse, and mental illness. The majority of these suicides occur in transgender youth under the age of 18, and on average only 18.2% survive to adulthood. The remaining 20% are usually outright murdered by family members or peers._ **

****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These statistics are totally made up, but LGBT+ people being abused/raped/murdered by people they know isn't. It's a hideous occurrence that sadly happens much more often than in any other "group" in the United States. As of 2015, the combined rate of attempted/completed suicides in the transgender community was marked at 41%, almost ten times that of the general population.


	8. When everything peels away.

“Oh my God,” Debby groaned, rubbing her face.

“I don’t think God had anything to do with this,” Alyssa grumbled as a soldier waved his metal stick at their shoes.

“What the hell is this? You’re way over the limit,” the army man complained, his voice sounding almost robotic through his gas mask.

“What do you want us to do? I already threw away the shoes that live here at the hospital, if I toss these I won’t have anything to wear,” Debby snapped at him, indignantly pulling the plastic covers over her sneakers. “I’m sure my feet won’t fall off if I keep wearing my shoes.”

“Alright, lady, but when you can’t walk later…”

 _Yeah, yeah,_ Debby thought to herself as she tied the surgical gown behind her back. The air filter she’d been given by Matt the hazmat guy had run out of filters yesterday, and this morning the soldiers with detectors had declared her protective suit to be too contaminated, so now she was stuck wearing the same PPE as the rest of the staff. It wasn’t much different from covering their bodies before a case, except that there were lines around her eyes from wearing chemical splash goggles all night.

“You’re not supposed to-” the soldier started to say, but she cut him off.

“I’ve been working for three days straight.”

She poured the coffee into a mug and drank it immediately. They’d run out of creamer and sugar packets, and the taste and temperature told her the pot had been sitting there for more than two hours. But she needed the caffeine and didn’t care. After downing it and making a face, Debby put on a clean procedure mask, a hood and her recently-washed goggles before leaving the break room and heading upstairs. Some of the rooms on 2-North had been taped off because they were too radioactive, so even though the military had evacuated a significant number of patients they were still over their capacity.

That didn’t bother her as much as the noise. It wasn’t from the staff, but rather the victims, who were constantly groaning and howling in agony. The firemen and plant workers who hadn’t already gotten evacuated had been given the maximum allowable doses of Oxycontin for their wounds, but it didn’t help. She’d never seen burns like theirs before. Some were all the way down to the bone, making the skin peel off in layers and leaking discolored blood and pus. Even trying to dress those injuries in sterile gauze bandages (which they’d run out of a few hours ago, and were now using regular gauze) made it worse.

Debby took a deep breath before entering the first room. It was a four-cubicle patient room, but the curtain dividers were pulled back and six people were resting inside. Two didn’t even have beds, but rather the ED stretchers they’d been brought up on. A doctor she didn’t know was intubating one of them, and every time his protective gown brushed the patient’s arm it drew more blood.

“Are you on this floor today?” the doctor asked, not looking up.

“I’ve been on this floor since yesterday morning,” Debby nodded.

“Half my patients can’t even talk anymore, and whoever brought them in didn’t chart them properly. Can you give me a hand?”

“I can try… why weren’t they charted?”

“I don’t know, I guess the other nurses didn’t feel as helpful as you,” the doctor muttered bitterly.

She scowled behind her procedure mask, but didn’t say what she was thinking.

“This is Jacob Durham.” She pointed to the first patient, the one closest to her on the left. “He’s a firefighter who came to us after the roof in the turbine hall collapsed. He has a concussion and thermal burns on his face and neck, and his left hand sustained a crush fracture.”

“What’s his contamination reading?”

“Um…” She scooped up the piece of paper from the counter that Matt had scribbled the radiation levels of the patients on and squinted; the handwriting was a jumbled mess. “We read thirteen rem, but that’s what the detector picked up from his skin. There’s no way to know the dose he took when he was there.”

“Has he regained consciousness?”

“Yesterday,” she nodded. “But he complained about a headache and lost consciousness after three hours. Dr. Oswald’s assessment was a subdural hematoma caused by the TBI, but he’s been showing some symptoms of severe radiation exposure. His blood vessels are so fragile that it was difficult to start a fluid line, and the soldiers told us we have to limit our exposure to their bodily fluids and won’t allow us to operate on anyone who’s been to the accident site.”

Now, the doctor looked up at her, frozen in place otherwise. “You’re shitting me right now.”

“I wish I was,” Debby shook her head, feeling her eyes start to sting. “They said their orders are to keep us from risking ourselves over victims who… who will just… just die anyway.”

Normally she would never say things like this in front of patients, but she was exhausted and none of them were conscious at the moment anyway. It was a struggle not to let the tears fall behind her goggles.

“This is disgusting,” the doctor hissed, hanging his head for a second before banging a hand on the rail of the stretcher. “If we’re not allowed to help the people who got hurt, then _why_ are they keeping us here at all?”

 

But he’d been wearing gloves… so why was this happening?

It was all Alex could think about as he sat on the stretcher, staring at where fluid was leaking out from under the bandages. It wasn’t blood… maybe lymph? He didn’t know. His hands were wrapped in several layers of gauze and tape after the skin on his fingers and palms had suddenly fallen off when he’d been helping to transfer a patient, so now he _was_ the patient, waiting to be evacuated.

At some point a couple of days ago a guy in a yellow plastic coverall had measured him, and less than two minutes later a nurse and an orderly had been sent over to take his clothes. He’d been on the stretcher in the hall since then, wearing nothing but a hospital gown and a blanket, until yesterday night when he’d been put into a cubicle with two other people. They were worse off than him; one was constantly bleeding from every orifice and crevasse in his head (even his eyes), and the other was so badly burned that he’d been wrapped up in dressings like an Egyptian mummy. Like Alex’s hands, that person was dripping with pus from several places on his body.

When he’d been forced to stop working by his injury, one of the nurses had given Alex a shot of some narcotic, but it had worn off after a few hours and he hadn’t gotten another one since. He’d been burned on his mother’s iron once when he was six years old, and the pain sort of reminded him of that, only much worse. It wasn’t exactly the same, though. If he didn’t know better he could almost swear he felt the remaining flesh and shreds of skin breaking down even more under the bandages.

The steady bleeping of the EKG attached to the burned man suddenly changed to an unbroken, high-pitched whine. Alex’s head whipped around to look; he knew that sound all-too well. Without a second’s hesitation, he jumped out of bed to help, but when he reached out he saw his hands and remembered. So he threw the curtain aside and stood in the doorway: “Hey! We need help in here! There’s a guy coding!”

Two people covered in surgical attire stomped into the cubicle, shouting back and forth through their dust masks once they reached the guy who’d gone into arrest. One of them started on the airway while the second snatched up a pair of scissors to cut away the bandages, and even though Alex couldn’t really see what was going on otherwise, he definitely caught the wash of old blood and lymph that splashed to the floor around the healthcare worker’s boots when the gauze was removed. They fussed around for a couple of minutes, but ultimately switched off the EKG and unlocked the stretcher to remove the body from the cubicle. As they went by, Alex could only stare - where the dressings had been cut away from the man’s chest, it just looked like one massive wound. Even after they were gone a few seconds later, the images of bleeding all over himself when his skin peeled from his hands wouldn’t stop jumping into his head.

 

Brendon was pulling his hair out when the medic came in.

“What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer, but instead asked his own question. “Why is this happening? I woke up and huge clumps of my hair got left on the pillow. I can just pull it right out like this, what the _fuck_ is going on?”

“Calm down,” the soldier insisted, slowly moving over to the box around him made from clear plastic curtains. “How do you feel?”

“Mostly just pissed off,” Brendon snarked. “I feel better, can’t you let me out of this hell-hole now?”

“We can’t do that, it’s against protocol.”

“I don’t give a shit about your protocol,” he snapped. “I was sick for a couple days, yeah, but I’m fine now, so you should let me go. I don’t want to hang around here any longer than I have to.”

“You can’t leave,” the army doctor shook his head, reaching out even though he was a couple feel away. “You’re highly contaminated, we need to contain you until it’s safe to evacuate.”

“ _I don’t want to be fucking contained!_ ” Brendon screamed, balling his hands into fists and standing up out of bed. “You just fucking stick me in here, all by myself with nothing to do all day, and don’t even fucking check on me. But oh, now that I’m _not in pain anymore_ , you’re all fucking concerned now! What the hell is wrong with you people? No, you know what, don’t even fucking answer that! You’re not here to help me, so _get out!_ ” He jabbed a scabbed finger at the opening between the tarpaulins.

“I can’t do that.” Somehow, the medic was still infuriatingly calm. “Please get back onto your bed, sir. You’re very radioactive, and your immune system is down. If you come outside of the plastic, you’re putting everyone in danger, even yourself. If you don’t lie down I’ll have to call in some of my friends to hold you while I give you your exam.”

Brendon continued to glare angrily for a moment, but eventually came to his senses and decided that no, he didn’t want to get tackled to the floor by five soldiers. Still fuming, he sat back down on the edge of the cot, making the plastic under the sheet rustle.

The medic slowly entered the inner cubicle and began feeling under his chin and arms, listening to his breathing, looking down his throat and eyes. Adhesive bandages on the backs of his shoulders were changed and some kind of cream smeared across the broken skin, which actually only made it hurt worse. A fresh bag of saline was put into his IV line. And then, as always, the series of samples. His skin was swabbed. The wounds in his back were swabbed. Inside his ears and nose - more swabs. A blood sample and a urine sample.

About an hour later Brendon was given another in a series of transfusions, and after that he was alone again.

 

**_In cases of critical levels of radiation exposure, even many where the victim absorbs lethal doses, the initial symptoms are often followed by a brief period of latency. For the medical staff in charge of these patients, it is often commented that this is the worst part. The victim begins to feel better for a day or two and believes they’re recovering, only for the illness to return in even greater severity._ **

**_The patient will begin to suffer emerging burns and wounds in their skin from the beta radiation, while their white cell count becomes virtually nonexistent and makes them prone to infection. This commonly results in blackening of the skin around orifices and wounds, as well as bleeding and candida in the mouth and nose. If the red marrow has been damaged enough or destroyed altogether, their blood dies as well, which often causes bruising and hemorrhages. Without a transplant it will inevitably result in organ failure and death._ **

**_Blood transfusions and skin grafts can help in some cases, provided the patient in question has taken less than 300 rem. However they have only a limited effectiveness. Beyond 250-300 rem of exposure, blood transfusions provide only a certain amount of relief, and beyond 300 marrow transplants become necessary. Skin grafts, similarly, are useful within a specific range. If too much of the victim’s skin is damaged by beta radiation, infection is more or less inevitable, and with a compromised immune system the patient often dies even below the median lethal dose of ~400 rem._ **

****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nurses almost never get the respect they deserve at their jobs, whether from the doctors, family members, or the patients themselves.
> 
> TBI stands for traumatic brain injury. A subdural hematoma is a pool of blood between the brain and its outermost covering within the skull.
> 
> Doctors and nurses would *never* talk to each other like this, or about this subject matter, in front of patients whether they were awake or not. But after being awake for days on end they're slipping.


	9. When it's not a lethal dose.

Most of the patients had been evacuated, _finally,_ but the ones who’d already died would be left in the morgue until the army’s decon unit came through the scrub the hospital. Really, though, Debby just couldn’t bring herself to care about that right now. She’d gotten maybe five hours of sleep total since the incident, and she still wasn’t even sure what said incident actually was. Nobody was telling them anything.

But at least she had time to call her son, now.

 _Crackle._ “Mom?”

“Kyle, how are you doing? Where are you?”

Debby felt shock jolt through her when her son suddenly burst into tears.

“Mom, Zach offed himself!” Kyle bawled on the other end of the phone. “He didn’t say why he did it! I think it’s because I left and he was still there!”

“Shhh, calm down, honey,” Debby interrupted, trying in vain to soothe him. “It’s not your fault. Where are you?”

“We-” Sniff. “We’re in Canada. There’s all kinds’a stuff on the news over here right now that a bomb or something went off right where we live! You should come to where we are!”

“Hey, hey, Kyle. Honey, take some deep breaths,” Debby urged. “I’m almost positive there wasn’t a bomb. As soon as I can leave the hospital, I’ll come right over to you and dad, I promise. It’ll probably only be a couple more days, okay?”

“Dad made me throw away my shoes and clothes when we got here, but he wouldn’t tell me why. He just said they were dirty, but I swear I put on clean clothes before we left.”

Debby thought hard, trying to come up with an explanation that wouldn’t scare Kyle even more that wasn’t a lie.

“Well, there was just something dangerous in the rain, that’s all. But you threw everything away, so you won’t get sick from it. Did you take a shower when you got there, too?”

“Yeah, dad made me stay in there for, like, an hour just scrubbing myself the whole time.”

“Good. Like I said, you probably won’t get sick, you weren’t around it for very long.”

“Why did they make you stay at the hospital?” Kyle wondered. “It it’s poisonous shouldn’t they make everyone leave?”

“They are making everyone leave, they just couldn’t do it very fast and we all had to stay and take care of some patients. Most of the patients are gone now, though, so I’ll get to leave soon.”

“Are you sure we won’t get sick? There was a thing on TV from the government telling everyone to stay inside all the time and to only eat canned food. We’re not supposed to drink milk, either.”

“You won’t get sick, honey, just do what they say on TV.” The door suddenly swung open and a soldier in a rubber suit with an air tank motioned for her to come with him. “Okay, I have to go, now. Just do what they on TV and I’ll be with you and dad in a couple days.”

“Okay, Mom…”

“Okay. I love you, Kyle.”

“Love you too.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Debby slipped her phone into her pocket under the plastic isolation gown and followed the army man out into the ED. They’d gathered the staff near the entrance through the ambulance bays and were measuring everything with their long metal sticks. The rattling from their detectors was deafening.

 

Alex didn’t know what was happening anymore - last night he’d left the hospital, herded into the back of a truck by soldiers in bulky hazmat suits, and then put into what he thought was a school. Everything was covered in plastic, even the walls, and they put him into a cubicle of tarps. Thick camouflage tarps, with an inner box around a stretcher of clear plastic sheets. There was an IV pole, absorbent material on the ground around the stretcher, and a bucket. Nothing else.

Alex struggled to lay down and get comfortable without using his hands, but it seemed like nothing worked. His feet ached, his skin burned. His left ear dripped blood every so often. The inside of his mouth, especially his tongue, was so swollen that he couldn’t drink water, he could barely talk, and it felt like his face had swelled up, too.

A medic finally came to check him after what felt like a year of painful tossing and trying to take a nap.

“Boyd?” Alex nodded. The medic pushed aside the clear plastic sheet and entered the inner box. “How old are you?”

Alex shook his head, gesturing to his mouth with his left hand because that one hurt less. The thin disposable pillow felt like somebody had taken a sander to his scalp.

“Your mouth?” Nod. “Okay. Sit up.” Alex struggled to do it on his own, annoyed that the medic made no move to help him. “Open your mouth?”

A flashlight was shone in, and behind the green chemical splash goggles Alex saw the other man’s eyes get as big as dinner plates.

“Okay… uh, well, good news, your gross exposure looks like it was less than 200 rem. The lethal dose is 400, and if you got that you’d be way worse off right now. You’ll probably just need skin grafts and some hospital time, maybe a few transfusions. Makes you a higher priority, too, since you’ll probably make it, so you’ll get outta here sooner. Um. I’m gonna check the rest of you now, okay? I’ll do your hands last. I just need to grab someone else for assistance.”

The medic disappeared and Alex slowly rested his hands on the edge of the cot at his sides. He’d never had any major injuries as a kid, so after seven years as an emergency responder it was really odd and frightening to see things from the other perspective. The uncertainty, not knowing what was wrong with him exactly, or how it would go once he found out. And the helplessness. He hated not being able to take care of himself.

Alex wasn’t exactly sure, but he guessed it took about forty-five minutes for them to finally appear in his cubicle. One was stretching exam gloves over the long surgical mitts that covered the plastic sleeves of his smock, while the other was pushing a rattly cart with a clear trash bag over it - Alex could see various basic medical supplies on it and a fresh bag of saline for his fluid line.

“Sorry for leaving you hanging, there was an emergency,” the first medic apologized. “Last name again?”

“Boyd… what happened?” Ugh. He shouldn’t have tried to talk, now his gums were bleeding.

They exchanged a glance; one was taller than the other and had goggles, but other than that he couldn’t tell the difference between the pair.

“Hazmat spill,” Shorty answered after a second. He pulled out a tube of antibiotic gel, which Alex thought was a waste of time. It he ended up getting MRSA or VRE, he’d already probably been infected. “We’re gonna do your hands last since they’re the worst… why are you wearing boots?”

“Um,” Alex mumbled, swallowing another mouthful of blood, “should I not be?”

“The nurses gave you back your clothes, didn’t they?” Goggles demanded, suddenly sounding pissed. “I thought they were instructed to discard all the personal items!”

“Who knows,” Shorty shrugged. “They’re civilians, too, not really best known for following orders.”

The army medics didn’t say anything else, but immediately picked up scissors and one of their annoying detector machines with the metal wand. His boots were too thick to cut and he’d gotten a nurse to tie them for him, so the laces were snipped to get them off. Shorty measured his whole body quickly, then scooped up a second pair of scissors.

“Everything has to go, the hospital gown they gave him has three millisieverts and that’s the cleanest thing on him.”

The faded cloth was easily removed, though Shorty cut through the string at the back rather than untie it. Goggles opened his socks at the sides, and Alex frowned - sure, they hadn’t been white since he’d bought them God knew when, but he didn’t remember them being _that_ discolored…

The socks were slowly peeled away and tossed into the metal bucket on the floor, and Goggles immediately stripped off his outer gloves. As the medic pulled on a fresh pair Alex raised his feet enough to see that they were blistered, especially his toes, while the bottoms and sides had so many bruises he could barely tell where one ended and another began. The skin on his lower legs, about a third of the way up his calves where the boots had been touching, were red and cracking.

“Are you an emergency worker? How much time were you outside in the rain?” Goggles queried.

“Don’t know. Took back most of our own guys, then my hands…”

“Damn. Okay.”

“Doesn’t look much better over here,” Shorty offered. “His back and shoulders are showing some burns already. Do we know what his gross exposure was?”

“My guess is about 200 rem, but according to the hospital staff he was one of the ones who worked the longest. I’m surprised he didn’t take more.”

“You know what happened to Ben? He’s my partner, know if he’s okay?”

“If he’s here, he’s not in our section,” Goggles shook his head as he cut up the outer seam of Alex’s pant leg. “Or at least not that I saw. Bohr?”

Shorty - Bohr - shrugged. “Um… not unless Ben is short for Brendon, we have a Brendon.”

“No, Benjamin, Ben Jones.”

“Nope. No Jones. If I see him, I can tell him you asked,” Bohr offered. “It won’t be until tonight, though. My shift ends in half an hour.”

Stripped to his stretched-out gray boxer briefs, Alex took a good look at himself and was horrified. Large patches of skin were breaking into lesions and blisters, especially around his knees and shoulders where his clothes had been the most wet, though there were also noticeable red splotches in seemingly random places along his arms and chest. Partly obscured by the elastic waistband of his underwear was a ring of purple-black bruises where his thick nylon belt had been.

“Do we have a full box or a partial box of tegaderm?” Goggles asked.

“Full.”

“Good, iodine swabs?”

“I think we took two out of the box so far, we should have enough.”

“Okay. Go find another bucket, I can’t believe they only left one in here, and see if Jackson’s free to come take labs. By the time Boyd was admitted they were too backed up to check him.”

Bohr disappeared around the tarpaulins while Goggles practically painted every inch of Alex’s body with iodine. The parts with lesions were then re-wiped with alcohol (that wasn’t painful at all...) and covered with hemostatic sponges, then a larger gauze pad that was secured with sterile bandages. The red spots were also wiped with alcohol, then dressed in more gauze pads and tegaderm film. He didn’t get why, though; they were just red spots, not wounds.

Alex’s feet were put into hard plastic splints after that to keep him from trying to walk, because apparently any movement would rip his skin under the bandages. Not that he really wanted to go running around anyway. He was in too much pain for that. Once Goggles had finished plastering most of his body with gauze and tegaderm, he gave Alex a new patient gown and changed his outer gloves.

“Okay, your hands are next, but we’ll have to… oh, never mind. Perfect timing, Bohr.”

“Yup,” Bohr grunted setting down the bucket on the floor. “Jackson’s busy, apparently six patients basically all coded at once so now he has to take care of it.”

“Damn… which ones?”

“Five were nuke victims, the other one was in critical care anyway and kicked the bucket by coincidence. Nobody from our section today.” Bohr stripped off his exam gloves, then his surgical mitts, and stepped out of the clear enclosure. Everything else came off after that until he was just in his plastic suit and boots; the exterior PPE was simply left in a heap on the floor. “I’m off in fifteen minutes, I’ll go tag Peters in for you and keep an eye for Jackson on my way out.”

“Understood.”

Goggles slowly began unwrapping the first bandage, cutting it when he came to a sticky spot. It was separated with more alcohol, though once the second roll started coming off Alex was unnerved as pus and discolored blood began coming out from underneath in long, sticky strings to bead up on the floor.

“Infected?” Alex croaked out, his gums still dribbling blood as well.

“I don’t know.” The medic shook his head and started on the third layer. His blue exam gloves were smeared with fluid. “Looks to me like… oh. Um. Wow.”

“What?” Alex was afraid to look and kept his eyes on Goggles’ goggles.

“I hope you’re left-handed.”

“Why?”

“It’s in a late stage of necrosis. The good news is I don’t think you have a secondary infection. I’m going to administer a local anesthetic and re-wrap it.”

Alex sat still and was quiet while the army medic did exactly that, then checked the condition of his left hand. Since he was right arm-dominant this one wasn’t nearly as bad off, though what little skin remained was practically swiss cheese from the cracks and lesions. Goggles smeared the limb up to his elbow in antibiotic gel before dressing it in an insane layer of sterile bandages, eventually looking like a huge white mitten. Then the medic scooped up a CB off the belt of his plastic suit; even the radio was wound in Seran wrap.

“Corporal Ratner to Sergeant Jackson. Jackson, do you have a copy? Over.”

“This is Jackson, go ahead, corporal. Over.”

“I’m currently attending a moderately contaminated patient in Delta-12, presenting late-stage radiological necrosis in the right hand. All five digits and all metacarpals are affected, requesting assessment for emergency field amputation. Over.”

 

**_Necrosis (the death of cells or tissue) is a medical condition most often caused by external factors, the most common trauma and infections. If caught early, the damaged tissues can often be removed to prevent further injury to the patient. However, if the condition is left untreated for too long, it may become severe enough for extreme measures. If the injury has taken place in a limb or digit, amputation may be deemed necessary if the affected area is large enough, appears to be spreading, or is host to a secondary infection (particularly MDROs)._ **

**_A rare but extremely destructive form of this affliction is radiological necrosis. This injury was not documented until the 20th century following the advent of nuclear technology, but is often more difficult to treat than more common varieties. Acute exposure to high doses of radiation damage cell structure, and may even completely destroy chromosomes and DNA. This in turn makes it impossible for the irradiated tissue to produce new cells that would otherwise take the place of the damaged ones._ **

**_Subdermal “burns” caused by Beta particles present a greater risk of developing into radiological necrosis for this reason. Thermal or chemical burns (1st degree and 2nd degree only) eventually heal, though they may scar, and by themselves will not injure surrounding tissue. Subdermal Beta burns, potentially, may be contaminated as well. This contamination will not only worsen the initial wound but also cause it to spread deeper, as well as drastically increase the risk of infection by directly interfering with the body’s autoimmune response to environmental pathogens._ **

**_In cases of radiological necrosis, which does not occur except following severe exposure, even in the earliest stage of cell death the affected tissues almost always require surgical intervention._ **

****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Radiological necrosis" is actually a made-up term. It's so rare (basically there are no documented cases except the victims of Chernobyl) that I couldn't find any medical pages describing it, but even if there isn't a specific name for it it's still a real condition. Pretty much it's when part (or all) of your body takes too much radiation at once, so all your cells die and you basically get to watch yourself come apart at the seams. It's even more horrific than it sounds.


	10. When the shift finally ends.

Derek groaned inwardly as he sat on the side of his cot. He’d just gotten out of his plastic suit and into his combat uniform, and now it was time for the worst part of the month: when he made the obligatory call to check in with his father. It almost made him glad his mother was in prison, because he’d never liked her either and that gave him a very good excuse to never contact her again. But he still had to call his other parent, who still clung to unrealistic expectations of his character.

Two rings.

“Hello?”

“Hey, dad, it’s me.”

“Derek! Ah, I was waiting to hear from you. How’ve you been, son?”

“Alright. We’re responding to a crisis but that’s all I can tell you, it’s being kept under wraps for now.”

“Ah, I see… well, you should still be proud. You’re doing good and serving your country.”

“Yup,” Derek muttered, rolling his eyes. Serving his country… yeah, right. More like serving Haliburton most of the time. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so-on had all been soldiers, so it wasn’t like he’d had much choice. Plus there were literally no other jobs at the time he’d enlisted. “How about you? How’s Jimmy?”

“He’s down at Fort Myers Beach visiting his mother, but he’ll be back next week.”

“They, um, your neighbors haven’t found you out yet, right?” Derek replied, lowering his voice. He was more or less by himself right now, though, which was good. If the guys found out his dad was gay, a blanket party every night for the rest of his service would probably be the merciful option. “’Cause, um, since I’m out on disaster relief right now I won’t be able to just drop everything and help you move again.”

“No, no, everything’s fine,” his father assured him. “Hey, you found a girl for yourself yet? I’m still waiting on those grandkids, y’know.”

“Yeah right,” Derek scoffed. “I’m still 5’4” and fuck-ugly, dad. Girls _run_ when they see me. The only one who’s seeing less action than me is Croyle, and that’s just because he’s still pretty much a dorky college kid. That’s really stupid, y’know? Why don’t officers go to basic? They just do some ROTC at West Point and then they get to come boss my ass around? The post-it notes on his desk have been in the army longer than him.”

“I know what you mean, son,” his father chuckled. “I never saw one that knew his ass from his elbow until he made Major.”

A palm landed heavily on his shoulder, startling him slightly, and he saw Private Collins jerk a thumb towards the door. The units stationed here had appropriated the post office and public safety buildings to bunk in; ordinarily they’d be in tents, but the rain was still dumping fallout heavily onto the area. Derek’s platoon was in the fire station, and he still thought it was kind of weird that none of the vehicles were in the bays. They’d probably just been left at the plant or something.

“Shit, dad, I gotta go, something’s come up,” Derek admitted, getting to his achy feet. “I’ll call again next month.”

“Alright. You’re doing good work, son. We’re proud of you.”

“Uh-huh. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Derek shoved his phone into his pocket and then got into formation with his platoon. The lieutenant put them at ease.

“As of 0900, the last victims have been evacuated from the hospitals. The staff are being brought here now for decon and triage. Don your Level A suits and breathing apparatuses, report to the decon tent on the east entrance at 0945. Platoon! AttenTION! Fall out!”

God dammit, his shift had ended less than half an hour ago and now he had to do _more_ work? Yeah, the units that were supposed to arrive yesterday for relief had been redirected due to some kind of fuck-up or other, so they were short handed. But if Derek and his guys collapsed with exhaustion and couldn’t work anymore, what then?

They collectively stripped off their fatigues and slipped into disposable paper scrubs. There was a specific protocol - disposable clothing and socks, no underwear, a cooling vest. Over that cooling vest was the SCBA platform. Rubber boots and polyisoprene gloves for doffing later. And then the Tyvek suit - these ones were yellow, manufactured by Dupont. They were rear-entry, so that they could decon and more easily change air cylinders. The suit was sealed and pressurized to prevent exposure in the event of puncture. Then, the heavy chemical-resistant booties and gloves were duct taped to the suit itself.

Fully separated from the world around him, Derek was already sick of his mask hissing every time he breathed in, but at least they had throat mics this time. When they’d first arrived, they’d discovered their radios had stopped working because of the intense radiation, but now they had better insulated communication equipment.

After further instructions, they broke up and went to their assigned positions. At least his assigned sector was already full, Derek realized, so when it was time for his next shift he wouldn’t be dealing with any surprises. And he had one of the easiest jobs - measure the hospital workers post-decon, give them disposable scrubs like he had on under his suit, and send them on to the next station so the medics could check them out more thoroughly (or back to the beginning hose-down if they weren’t clean enough). Once all that was over and done with, he’d collect the personal dosimeters from the guys, check them, and report the data to the medics.

And the giant conveyor began. One by one they were shunted through the process - Derek wasn’t sure if they were victims or patients, given that these people had been at work less than an hour ago - and he checked each one. They each arrived to him looking the same: still damp because there hadn’t been time to dry them off all the way, slightly humiliated after their clothes had probably been cut from them, red lines around their eyes and faces from wearing goggles for days on end.

Every so often one would turn up with his or her head shaved, since contamination could be extremely difficult to remove from human hair. They all looked like they’d been punched in both eyes, so dark were the circles that showed exhaustion. And of course, as First Sergeant Kidd pushed the next one along, he wasn’t mean to them but he sure wasn’t nice to them, either. He had a job to do and didn’t care.

It was the dying patient who needed water all over again, and since nobody else would do it, then Derek decided it was _his_ job to care. So after making sure they were clean (enough), he got one of the disposable towels and rubbed them dry as gently as he could given the restrictions of his PPE. They were sometimes too tired to lift their arms anymore, so he helped them slide on the paper scrubs and then guided them to the medics with a hand on their shoulder. They almost always thanked him, too, but with his mask and the clear visor there was no way for him to reply, so he could only nod inside his hood.

By the end of everything, Derek could barely stay upright. All the discarded clothes, towels, sponges… everything was simply dumped out the entrance of the decon tent with plastic snow shovels to be gathered up by the squad assigned to it. The inside of the tent was hosed down, scrubbed, rinsed a second time and then covered in Decon Gel to get up whatever the soap hadn’t touched. They wiped off their suits and helped each other get clean after, and their personal dosimeters were all under the acceptable exposure limit when Derek checked them.

Back on his cot in the fire station, he’d had every intention of eating something so he wouldn’t be totally drained when he got up again for his shift, but had fallen onto his back without even untying his boots. He was out like a light.

 

He knew it had been so recent, but Brendon couldn’t remember feeling healthy. The other day he’d been pitching bitch-fits at the army doctors for neglecting him, but now if he sat up the whole world spun around him. He was puking and shitting pretty often, uncontrollably so, even though all he’d been given besides whatever fluids in the IV bags was chicken broth. Every now and then blood came up with everything else, and that should’ve scared him, but he was feeling too sick to care right now. Sometimes he broke out in sweat, but then started shivering, so he knew he had a fever.

There were all kinds of terms being tossed around him by the medics. Hypotension, probable leukopenia, electrolyte deficiency, aplastic anemia. He didn’t have the slightest idea what most of that even meant.

Right now, they were peeling the things from him, taking sloughs of his skin and huge black scabs away on the gauze. Once in awhile they’d mop off his body, and he wasn’t sure if it was sweat or blood. Maybe both. They’d smear some kind of sticky gel all over him and then wrap him in bandages and tape again.

When a handheld detection unit was waved over his wounds, the thing positively screamed. Even without seeing the display, Brendon knew the contamination level was something ridiculous. Surprisingly, that was actually sort of funny; Ty had always bitched about calibrating their Geiger counters, so who knows what he’d have said about this kind of dose rate?

When he’d asked about it, only one medic had answered him - their closest guess was that he’d absorbed around 750 or 800 rem. Pity he didn’t remember what that meant, or what the lethal dose was supposed to be.

 

**_Different levels of acute radiation exposure produce varying symptoms and have understandably varying survival rates as well. It also depends largely if the entire organism is exposed, and which type(s) of radiation were absorbed. For the first example, it is assumed that the victim is an adult human male of average height and weight, and between 20-30 years old. The assumed type of radiation is the gamma ray, at a dose of 600-800 Roentgen Equivalent Man (rem)._ **

**_Following the onset of the prodrome (nausea/vomiting, heavy diarrhea, headache, fever, and possible cognitive impairment) within 10-60 minutes and lasting not more than 48 hours (24 for cognitive impairment), the latency period will not last for more than 7 days. Under these criteria for the prodrome and latency period, even without available measurement at the time of exposure, this dose can be safely assumed by the medical practitioner._ **

**_After the latency period, the victim will begin to experience a battery of unpleasant symptoms. As with a lower acute dose, the vomiting, nausea and headache will return, as will the hemophilia and increased risk of infection. However, it is also categorized as presenting with dangerous leukopenia and hypotension, and the fever will be increased from its previous onset. Supportive therapy includes antibiotics, supplemental vitamins/electrolytes, and blood transfusions. Transplants of bone marrow or fetal liver cells are likely needed to combat the leukopenia._ **

**_[PLEASE NOTE: This example has been simplified for the purposes of the lesson. It does not take into account other factors, such as concurrent injury/illness, genetics, and exposure to other types of radiological elements. The dosage here is also an extreme case with a relatively low survival rate; virtually all patients die without medical care at this level. With advanced treatment, 50-95% of patients who suffered this dose will die.]_ **

****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Medical Terminology
> 
> Hypotension = Low blood pressure  
> Leukopenia = Insufficient production of red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets  
> Aplastic anemia = Damage to the bone marrow  
> Prodrome = Symptoms that may appear before the full onset of the disease, but which may be difficult to properly identify  
> Hemophilia = The inability for blood to form clots, which can lead to dangerous blood loss


	11. The classified reports.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is par for the course in my narratives, especially this one, but consider yourself warned that there is some very ugly shit in this chapter. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
> 
> Also this chapter is a little shorter than usual because it got so depressing I couldn't put any more into it... that should tell you something.

_During The Explosion_

Terry Flynn stayed at his post in the control room even when the alarms were screaming and everyone else ran to either help or escape. In his mind, he still needed to keep an eye on his instrument panel, because that was his job. The wave of gamma radiation rendered him unconscious, and he was carried from the building by Brendon Stahl. He went into arrest without regaining consciousness and was pronounced dead on arrival to the emergency department.

Ty Simmons immediately understood the danger, and ran through the halls yelling at everyone he saw to put on their PPE, grab a detection instrument, and start trying to put out the fire. He was entering the turbine hall for unit 2 when the ceiling began to cave, which buried Ted Connors, who’d been trying to smother the flames. His friend was killed instantly, and ultimately the body would never be recovered. Simmons himself was later removed as a casualty and admitted to a hospital like the majority of his colleagues.

Patrick Finch had run forward with an extinguisher when he noticed the flames in the turbine hall. Unaware of the faulty electrical wires which had caused the blaze, he stepped right into the pool of water and was electrocuted. Even long after he’d died, the danger was still present, making it difficult for the firemen to move his body.

Fred Pierce was the worker who called 9-1-1, after his instrument panel in the control room had gone berserk. He ran out of the building afterwards to look for external damage. After not only getting too close to the ruptured nuclear core but also drenched in rain that was carrying the fallout back down to earth, he received a massive 1097 rem of radiation and would die eighteen days later from multiple organ failure and concurrent infection.

Carl Rein had checked the area with a radiation meter after the emergency was made known to the plant staff. He wrongly informed his colleagues that there hadn’t been a significant leak of radioactive material because the meter hadn’t been properly calibrated and was showing normal readings when in fact the level of contamination was so high that, in some areas, an unprotected man would receive a fatal dose in less than 20 minutes. This misinformation, though not his fault, would see the deaths of many workers, including him.

 

_First Response_

Jacob Durham had been trying to recover the body of Patrick Finch when a second structural collapse occurred in the turbine hall. It wasn’t as severe and he wasn’t killed, though he did suffer a blow to his skull. This would prove to be indirectly fatal, as it caused a subdural hematoma. When the doctors were instructed not to operate, the pressure inside of his brain cavity caused enough damage to make him lose consciousness and ultimately go into arrest. However, this was a merciful end for him, since he’d taken 518 rem and would’ve most likely died from acute radiation toxicity.

Xavier Harris and Adrian Lauzon departed the fire station first when the call went out, but due to the weather became incapacitated during a collision with an 18-wheeler. Harris suffered an open fracture in his left arm when the ambulance had ended up in the ditch beside the highway. The airbag in the passenger side malfunctioned and didn’t deploy, which concussed Lauzon and gave him whiplash. However, given that they were inside of a vehicle until two of their colleagues assisted them (prior to transporting any accident victims), Harris and Lauzon only accumulated a mere 20 rem each and suffered no immediate health effects from the contamination.

Four firefighters (Edward Kimm, Dylan Scholz, Charlie Redford and Guy Jameson) stood directly in the path of the ruptured core trying desperately to control the blaze with their high-pressure hoses. Not only did this fail to have the desired effect, but the intense heat evaporated it almost instantly and caused the steam to carry further radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. The four men suffered such intense gamma radiation exposure that they’d begun collapsing and vomiting within the hour. Not one of them could walk back to the ambulances for treatment, and they were the first public safety workers to be hospitalized for radiation sickness. They died horrible deaths within 12 days.

One young fireman, Ricky Dominguez, was the only one to notice the flames on the roof spreading rapidly towards a neighboring energy block. He reported it urgently and climbed on top of the structure with two others (Evan Spengler and Troye Winters) to try and stop it from reaching further. Their proximity to the ruptured reactor housing doused them in lethal gamma and x-ray radiation, but the trio stayed until soldiers replaced them in the afternoon. Dominguez, Spengler and Winters had to be carried down from the roof by the medics after they’d been weakened by such severe exposure. They were so contaminated that their turnout gear was removed on the spot before they were evacuated to one of the hospitals. Dominguez and Winters died in agony from the radiation toxicity after 18 and 21 days respectively. Spengler lost consciousness in the ambulance, went into arrest, and was resuscitated four times before he was admitted to an emergency department. The fifth time he coded, they were unable to revive him. Without the steadfast efforts of those three men, the fire could’ve damaged a second reactor and made the situation many times worse. Their names, and the names of the other emergency responders, would not appear in any official statistic until nineteen years later.

 

_Triage_

From the vehicles arriving at the hospital emergency departments repeatedly, to say nothing of the EMTs and victims, contamination was transported directly from the stricken reactor to the parking lots of these facilities. The result were dangerous “hot spots” of radioactivity that would go undetected until they were noticed by military personnel much later, which caused further harm to first responders, patients, and hospital staff.

One of five hospitals that received victims of the accident became so overwhelmed in the first hours of the catastrophe that paramedics were forced to leave patients in ambulance bays and in front of nurses’ stations waiting for treatment so that they could return and bus more casualties. Two patients died waiting to be admitted due to life-threatening burns, and this went unnoticed until the evening when an orderly realized those same two had been there since she’d started her shift.

Despite their inadequate PPE, approximately 68% of hospital workers involved surprisingly escaped acute lethal doses, due largely to the fact that the military confined them inside their facilities. However, the psychological damage to the medical staff was absurd. In one hospital, Dr. Miles Landis (an emergency department attending physician) couldn’t take the stress or the sheer human suffering. He committed suicide by stealing enough narcotics from a medicine cart to overdose himself, and was discovered by one of the nursing supervisors the next morning.

 

_Deployment_

When multiple units of National Guard reservists were dispatched, instead of immediately assessing the damage at the plant, they hastily set up roadblocks and checkpoints to keep civilians _in_ the disaster zone to lock down the incident. Protective equipment was in such short supply that adequate gear was only provided to higher-ups and the troops on the site of the explosion.

Military CBRN equipment had not been modernized or even inspected recently enough for their protective properties to be guaranteed. In one extreme case, an entire crate of respirator filters was distributed that had expired six years prior. This fact went conveniently unnoticed, and 18 soldiers would suffer severe internal exposure as a result. Worst of all, the S-4 who deliberately overlooked this shortcoming was never discovered and went unpunished.

Following the situation assessment, the roof and structure fires had been extinguished by dawn the following morning through the use of chemical foam. However, the cracked unit wasn’t brought under control until four days after the explosion. The zirconium cladding of the fuel rods, as well as the uranium oxide fuel itself, had either burned up or melted within the reactor housing and poured an updraft of radioactive gasses into the air. It was smothered beneath tons upon tons of concrete, lead, and sand. Teams of soldiers on the more stable areas of the roof as well as helicopter crews deposited the material (more than 200 men in total), and within two years they would all have died from the magnitude of radiation toxicity.

Throughout this first phase of damage control, in most cases the dosimetrists were threatened with disciplinary action should they fail to keep their readings secret. These exposure rates were only reported to the officers in order to determine further logistics of the operations, and the vast majority of soldiers carried out their orders with no knowledge of the doses they received. Those working on-site are Edmons-Drake were allowed to take two or even three times the official limit before being transferred out of the hot zone.

 

_Evacuation_

Specialist Paul Ramirez, while checking apartment complexes for stragglers or stubborn civilians who didn’t understand the danger, encountered the body of a young woman in her bathroom. She was in her bathtub covered in blood, having succumbed to hypovolemia after attempting to self-perform an abortion with a bicycle spoke.

In one home he’d relayed orders to, PFC Darren Eliot noticed it was inhabited by two men. Assuming they were homosexuals, he reported this quietly to the platoon sergeant, and during the transport of evacuees the pair were sent to different locations on purpose.

Private Cory Daniels was assigned to check a street of duplexes and apartments for potential stragglers. In one of the duplexes, he discovered a small bedroom. Inside was a fine layer of dust, and it seemed to belong to a young boy - dark blue bedspread, a stack of X-Men comics. But obviously it hadn’t been used for a while. This room was just like his sister’s room, left in stasis, because Olivia had died of Hodgkin's and this little boy had obviously died, too. He called his mother that night and they cried together.

PFC Alan Voracek discovered a meth lab in one building that he was closing up after the evacuation. Not understanding what he was dealing with, he accidentally started a fire and asphyxiated from the fumes. His squad-mates were unable to rescue him in time and he was pronounced dead on the scene.

During the coordination to get evacuees onto the correct transports, Sergeant William Dover Jr. watched them with the question in his mind: “Do they feel the same way I did when my family moved after 4th grade?” It looked so similar to him, leaving and knowing they’d never come back, with cranky children and looking like they hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before. The only difference, to him, was that they had a lot less stuff being brought along.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are quite a few pieces of this inspired by the immediate response to Chernobyl.
> 
> Valery Khodemchuk was standing so close to unit 4 that his body was simply incinerated, and his remains were never found. There is a memorial to him at the plant where people often leave flowers.
> 
> The detection equipment at the plant maxed out at less than 4 roentgen, so the true levels of contamination were not known until military dosimetrists arrived to make their assessment. When the number kept rising each time, they thought their equipment was faulty until they realized the nuclear core was still on fire.
> 
> Vladimir Shashenok, an employee of a Chernobyl subcontractor, was discovered severely injured under a fallen beam and died in a hospital without regaining consciousness.
> 
> The fire in the reactor core really did have this deadly effect from the firemen's hoses. The water simply turned to steam and carried radiation into the sky, leaving the flames untouched.
> 
> The firemen on the scene absorbed such huge doses of radiation that it really was that quick for them to start showing symptoms. Some of them had to carry passed-out comrades to the medical station, while others stubbornly refused to climb down from the roof until the fire had been contained to the nuclear core. Many of those heroes are now tragically almost forgotten.
> 
> People who had friends or family at the plant were crowding Pripyat's hospital that morning, trying to get to their loved ones, while militia held them back and tried to warn them about the radiation carried on ambulances.
> 
> There was almost no adequate protection for the ~800000 liquidators who were deployed to deal with the catastrophe, and those who wore lead-plated suits were the ones in the most extreme locations. They suffered severe exposure in spite of their gear because the radiation was simply too high to be shielded at that point.
> 
> It took 9 days to extinguish the fire in the destroyed unit. By that time it is estimated that 55% of the graphite had burned off, releasing untold amounts of fallout into the atmosphere. It was eventually smothered by flights of helicopters dropping sand and boric acid into the crater.
> 
> The individual dose rates were virtually always kept secret, or simply not recorded at all and then guessed at after the fact. This cost a great many liquidators their health, their jobs, and their lives.


	12. When you put lies on paper.

Debby huddled tighter into the blanket they’d given her, curled into a ball on the uncomfortable cot. It was hot out, now that the weather was back to normal, which she knew from overhearing the soldiers complaining to each other, but she felt cold and exhausted. That meant she had a fever, and she knew the medics had administered some type of antibiotics into her fluid line. She wondered what kind of infection she had.

Whatever it was, this wasn’t something she’d encountered before at work in any case. Her hands and feet were swollen up like bags of popcorn and the skin there had turned red, even blue and purple in some places. She’d started vomiting at some point during the last couple of days before the hospital staff had been evacuated, though that seemed to have stopped for the time being.

The strangest symptom, if that’s even what it was, had to be the little patches of arm and leg hair that had mysteriously fallen out. She didn’t know if this had already been happening to her legs (she hadn’t been shaving them, of course, since she’d been at work for who knew how many days) since she hadn’t taken off her scrubs long enough to see until the soldiers had been decontaminating her, but for her arms, at least, this was new.

Generally, the troops seemed afraid to get near them, she noticed. There had been several buildings in various locations that had been used as overflow medical shelters by the national guard, and Debby’s hospital had mainly been emptied into one that had been some city auditorium once the staff were finally evacuated. There were tarps and thick plastic sheets hung up all over the place, but they must not’ve had enough of them because she was in a tarpaulin “room” with three other people - two orderlies from pediatrics and another nurse who’d been in neurology.

“They just started shoving firemen in with us,” one orderly was recalling through his chattering jaw. Debby could feel the heat radiating off the others around her, so they must’ve had fevers, too. “The nursing supervisor tried bitching out the doctors for it, but the doctors said there was nowhere else to put them. We weren’t set up for it, though, our stuff is for kids so it’s all the wrong sizes. I remember this one ambulance driver who coded and they didn’t have an ambu-bag big enough for him. I had to bring the guy down to the morgue because everyone else was busy, and then later when I brought the autopsy report up the nurses were all talking about it. He died because inside his lungs were all blistered. That was the day before we came here.”

“I was talking to my sister, she worked in the lab,” the other nurse offered. Debby couldn’t remember their names, but she knew they’d told her. “After the first night they couldn’t run labs anymore because all the machines got contaminated somehow. They couldn’t figure out how it happened, though, because all the samples had been properly tagged and sealed. But the whole lab became radioactive. The hazmat guy came in the next morning, I think, and made them toss all the machines. They had to use the older ones that were phased out, and then the day after that those were all radiated, too. So then they had to stop doing labs, because we didn’t have anything left.”

There was a soft rustling of plastic, interrupting their quiet recollections. An army medic in a green suit and a gas mask came in, but through the clear Plexiglas Debby could see that his eyes were smiling. “Good news, we’ve checked all of your labs and none of you seem to have gotten a lethal acute dose. You’ve been cleared for treatment and we’re going to have you moved to facilities in the next state over as soon as the paperwork’s done.”

“We’re going to live?” the second orderly repeated back.

“Yes. They’ll take care of you there, and since you did so much work after the accident until we could finish taking over you’ll get priority and the expenses will be covered. Alright, I’m also here to do checks.”

“Are there any women?” Debby croaked out, her swollen mouth and throat protesting each syllable. “When I got here there were… some of them weren’t professional all the time…”

“Yes, I… heard about that. Um. No, we don’t, but I’m on duty right now and I promise I won’t try anything. Any time I see any of the others doing anything like that, I try to report it.”

This medic was efficient and friendly, which was soothing after the turmoil Debby had endured since the beginning of the catastrophe. He did their basic vital signs, helped them roll over so that he could put a new sheet under each of them, and brought an extra blanket to those who requested one. They learned he was Staff Sergeant Franklin Zusak, that he was always on first shift, and that being on first shift meant it would almost always be him attending them. It was a comforting thought - Zusak was gentle and professional with them, the way Debby had always tried to be with her patients.

“Now,” Zusak offered as he stripped the polypropylene exam gloves off the heavy chemical-resistant rubber ones that were undoubtedly part of his hazmat suit, “of course you all know this, but even though you’re not feeling like eating you should try to anyway. Radiation is extremely weakening to the body, but really it’s almost like any other acquired sickness. Nutrients will help counteract the effects. They won’t give you anything too heavy, of course, probably tomato soup or chicken broth. Apple juice or orange juice are also good. I’ll send one of my men through with your food and to check in on you in about an hour or so, and if you start feeling worse tell him so that I can come check you, too.”

“Can I call my son?” Debby asked before he could leave. “They took my phone.”

“We don’t have means for patients to make calls right now, but I can bring you some paper for a letter and send it for you. Will that be okay?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

 

Alex couldn’t help but keep staring at it - he didn’t think he’d ever get used to this.

They’d taken his right arm off at the elbow, so now there was just the upper half with the end covered in bandages. When he woke up this morning he’d reached up to scratch his face but the fingers just weren’t there, and he didn’t think there was a more upsetting way his day could’ve started.

It had only gotten worse from there. Bohr, as promised, had found out about Ben and come to tell him before his shift ended: his ambulance partner was in critical condition. Well, if Ben was still his ambulance partner. How would Alex do his job now? He’d been a fireman since he’d graduated school, he didn’t know anything else but how to be an emergency responder. But firemen usually had two arms, and a prosthetic probably just wouldn’t cut it (assuming he could even afford one).

His feet were still in hard splints, keeping him confined to his cot. The medics said he wasn’t getting any worse at this point, but Alex sure as hell wasn’t getting any better, either. The cracks in his skin still oozed blood every so often and his bruises, an entire rainbow of hideous colors over his body, showed no signs of fading. They told him it was because his immune system was weakened by the radiation, so he’d heal more slowly.

Care for patients in his situation was, dishearteningly, supportive. That was a polite way of saying they had no substantial treatments so they just kept giving you things to keep the damage from spreading as opposed to actually halting or reversing it. So he’d get blood transfusions and IV drips with painkillers, but he wished they’d put in something stronger because there wasn’t a place on him that didn’t ache. Even his mouth hurt. They fed him on soup broth and vitamins, but he could barely keep them down some days.

Some medic had at least explained things when he’d asked. Radiation killed fast-growing cells in his body, which was why his finger and toe nails had eventually all fallen out under the gauze dressings. The stomach and intestinal linings were also rapidly produced, making digestion difficult. They’d shaved his head, but the hair didn’t seem to be growing back. And if he was constantly shedding skin cells, they must’ve been constantly growing in the first place, but now they weren’t so his injuries couldn’t heal.

How long, though, would it stay like this? They told him he wasn’t terminal, his dose was high but not deadly, so that implied he’d eventually get better. But what was “eventually” for him? Weeks? Months? Years? Christ.

Alex didn’t know how he could deal with this. He was always by himself in this tarpaulin cell, except right before a shift change when a medic rushed to check him. He couldn’t read, even with his remaining hand, because it was still wrapped and it hurt to touch things with it even through all the bandages and tape. There was no TV. He was too ill and in too much pain to sleep more than a few minutes, so he couldn’t pass time that way. It was making him crazy.

 

_Dear Kyle,_

_I’m sorry for not calling the last few days. Our hospital was finally evacuated and I’m with the army. They’re taking care of us here. I don’t have my phone anymore, but they said I can write you letters the old-fashioned way. Hopefully you’ll still know what to do with it even though it’s not an email!_

_The building I’m in right now is safe, and they just need to move me to one more place after this. Then I’ll be able to come home. Hopefully it won’t take too long. I don’t think it will, because I’m not very sick. I just have a little bit of a temperature and a sore throat._

_How are things at home? I miss you and Dad every day. Remember to eat breakfast, it’s the most important meal of the day even when you’re out of school for the summer. Don’t be afraid to ask Aunt Nichole to make you muffins, I know you like her cooking. Remember to drink plenty of water if it gets hot out and wear sunscreen when you go outside. Are you going fishing with Granddad and Jared again this summer? The last time he took you, you said you had fun. Try not to sit inside on the Xbox for weeks on end!_

_Love, Mom_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Instead of a little blurb of exposition at the end of the chapter like I was doing before, I've decided (for now) to end them with letters back and forth between Deb and Kyle. The exposition was necessary up to this point because it contained information people don't usually just know off the tops of their heads, but there's only so many ways I can write about "the symptoms of radiation poisoning do this..." so I'm going to stop doing it.


	13. When someone has to remember it.

It had been more than two weeks, and the number of patients was finally decreasing for two reasons: firstly, they were finally being transferred to hospitals in other states now that things were ready for them there, and secondly because there was consistently two or more deaths per shift. Derek knew this because he was going through the process of switching out the plastic covers and tarpaulins in the empty cubicles for the time being. They were measured and sometimes slathered in decon gel, but more often just tossed, particularly those of the firemen. Almost a third of the first responders had kicked the bucket before they could be sent to medical facilities.

Everything else, usually, got wiped with alcohol or cleaned with the smeary blue decon gel - IV poles, stands for oxygen tanks, the metal frames of the cots. He wore his mask for this because he didn’t want to accidentally get splashed in the face with radioactive waste, but other than that he almost never did anymore unless he had to help one of the medics admit a new patient. That happened rarely at this point, though. The national guard seemed to be having an easier time than the initial responders.

The MPs had also showed up now, on top of everything. The plant workers who were still alive and able to talk were being extensively questioned about the incident, and from what Derek had overheard in the snips of conversation when he passed by the cubicles none of them had any clue what had gone down that morning. The words most often used were “accident” and “fire.”

_“I don’t know. There was a fire. They told me to put on a mask and my gloves.”_

_“We actually broke out the Geiger counters for this one, man. Mine wouldn’t even turn on.”_

_“I think it was an accident. I tried to help but the firemen made me leave. I just remember the hall floor was covered in water.”_

_“The air smelled funny. Like, metallic, and sort of chemical. It was weird.”_

_“I just know there was something on fire. I didn’t see it, though. Everyone was shouting and there was smoke coming from the turbine hall.”_

_“I think there were alarms going off, but I didn’t hear anything because there were so many fire truck sirens. The plant manager came into the control room and made us hit the emergency shutdown button, and then we got sent outside to wait.”_

_“It was my day off. I wasn’t even in the building, so I didn’t know anything happened until the firemen showed up.”_

_“We couldn’t see anything through the windows. It was raining too hard. I think there was an accident, or something. Something happened, right? Something made us all sick like this.”_

Derek would stop and listen sometimes, even though he wasn’t supposed to; he was really curious about this, himself. They were routinely briefed at the end of their shifts, but there was never any real information, just reports - this many came in today, this many got moved out today. This many died today. We need this many supplies and this many fresh uniforms. These are today’s measurements after each cycle of structural decon. And so on.

Soon, because they were dropping like flies, the firemen and paramedics were being interviewed as well by the investigative team.

_“I got hit with a blast of steam here - see? I didn’t really feel it, though. I thought my gear protected me enough. Then two days later the burn finally showed. Is that normal?”_

_“We had to get a couple guys out from under some shit because the ceiling caved. I just pulled some muscles, but I was wearing my SCBA. Why did I get sick? I was wearing my mask.”_

_“I saw a plant worker. He wasn’t listening to us, we kept trying to stop him from going back inside but he kept doing it. There were so many other guys he helped get out. He, um, fucking hell, man, he was bleeding so bad from his nose and his ears, but he kept going until he just passed out on the ground. We took him to the hospital finally. His whole body looked brown, like a really bad sunburn.”_

_“I didn’t know metal could burn. But there was so much metal on fire there… it had to be the metal burning. I could smell it when I changed my air cylinder.”_

_“It was like… I don’t even know how to say it. This was such a weird fire, I’ve never seen a fire like this. The smoke over the plant was fucking blue.”_

_“Why are you asking me, dude? I was just busing patients. I’m in training, so I’m not really allowed to do anything yet and I just drive. I’m not even that sick! Why do I have to stay here? I just want to go home and see my girlfriend. They won’t let me call her and she’s probably really scared something happened to me.”_

_“My friend, um… what was that place called? I think it was the ‘turbine room’ or something. A pipe broke and squirted something on him, and it caught. Part of… part of his boot melted onto his leg and I think his whole chest got burned. He died. My friend Danny. I want to send an email to his mom and his sister, but they won’t let me get up yet. Can you have them do that for me? They should know.”_

_“I don’t know anything. Just that it was raining really hard, and where my clothes got wet my skin is all peeled off now. And my arm… my fucking arm got sawed off at the elbow. But I wore my gloves, and me and Ben had real masks. My feet are so swelled up now… they said they gave me painkillers, but it really fucking hurts. I asked the soldiers how Ben is doing but they haven’t heard anything. Last time I knew, he was critical. I just want to know how he is.”_

_“Please go away… I just reported for a fire with the guys. I don’t know why you’re asking me all this shit. My whole skin is a rash. Please… just go. Please?”_

Derek heard everything as he was changing the tarpaulins. It stuck in his mind and, morbidly, he wanted to remember. So after the shift, before he fell asleep, he pulled his laptop out of his kit and typed out the bits and pieces he’d picked up. He didn’t have their names, but he had their words, and he knew he’d want to remember all of this later. Somebody should remember everything.

 

Right about the time he was in the back of the ambulance on his way to a hospital, Brendon started coughing chunks. They were tiny and bloody, but this felt different than before, when it had just been his gums bleeding.

The army medic attending him put him on oxygen for the rest of the trip, but Brendon didn’t really think it was helping. His lungs just felt… tired. They’d changed his bandages before leaving, but by now he could hear blood dripping slowly to the floor. Or he thought it was blood. Sometimes the fluids coming out of his ruined skin were funny colors, orange and white and yellow and slightly greenish.

The dressings were redone again once they’d finally wheeled him into the hospital. The doctors were in white and blue plastic suits with masks and visors, everything taped so that there wouldn’t be gaps. Maybe that’s what he should’ve done, Brendon mused, when he’d been running around in a hazmat suit at the plant. Duct-taped his sleeves and boots. Could it have kept him from getting sick…?

Whatever. He couldn’t go back for a do-over, and thinking around the pain was hard. Not even his body as much as his actual _bones_ were an overwhelming ache; he’d never had anything hurt this bad or even in this way before.

Brendon was taken up through an elevator and then moved carefully onto a bed inside of a clear plastic box, which annoyed him a little. He’d thought leaving the army hospital had been the end of that bullshit and he’d be in a normal room, but apparently not. This one, though, was a higher standard of care (unsurprisingly). It had all the wall fixings for oxygen and suction and all that. Now his lungs were being fed from the wall through a clear tube and he had wires from his chest to a heart monitor.

Brendon was injected with all kinds of things after that, but he didn’t pay attention to the explanations. He didn’t care. He was sick and his bones hurt, so getting a bunch of shots was beneath his notice at this point. Then they redressed his wounds a third time - blood clots and pus and messy gauze. Antibiotic gel, iodine, fresh bandages, tape, soft splints for his arms and legs. The latest in about eight hundred blood transfusions.

“The doctor will be with you in a minute,” one of them informed him before leaving the room.

 _So they weren’t doctors?_ Brendon wondered, not having the strength to roll his eyes. He still didn’t deserve real care, apparently, even now in a real hospital. What the fuck ever. He didn’t care anymore.

 

_Mom,_

 

_I’m glad you can write. Dad was really worried because you didn’t call, but now hes ok because you wrote. Why can’t you just come home now? Theres hospitals here in Vancouver. They could put you in the hospital here, nanna said so. Its stupid they don’t just send you here._

_Here at home stuff is kind of screwed up. Theres stuff on tv all the time saying food can’t go to stores and which food is safe to buy now. They tells us to stay inside with the windows closed and to tape plastic over them if we can. So now its really hot in the house and it sucks. So we’re probably not going fishing which sucks. Me and Jared smell really bad from the heat in the house. We’re supposed to drink bottled water and not water from the sink, so theres lots of plastic bottles just sitting around in the kitchen because we drink lots of water right now._

_One cool thing is a new Wolfenstein came out on the xbox so its a little less boring now. Me and Jared and dad take turns playing and its pretty cool. I liked the last one better though. What I really want is a new Fallout game, but in Canada this time. That would be awesome and I’d play it alot._

_We have to take this weird pill every morning with breakfast that protects us from the rads or something. Also theres guys out washing the street every day. Its really weird and a little scary. They wear those hospital masks and rubber boots. What happened mom? Did they tell you what happened yet? They won’t tell us up here, but mabey you know whats going on._

 

_Kyle_

 

_ps dad said hi._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kyle's spelling mistakes are on purpose.


	14. When the patients have finally been transferred.

Kyle thought it was dumb that he couldn’t take the mask off even when they were in the car. He had gone with Aunt Nichole and Jared to buy groceries just so that he could be out of the house, but really it hadn’t been that much better. His aunt had made them wear rain coats and those white dust masks before going out to the car, and even more weirdly it turned out most of the other people in the store were dressed like them - wrapped in plastic and wearing masks. Some had on gloves and rubber boots, or those army gas masks with the big black filters. It reminded him of horror movies about the end of the world that were caused by some disease.

Once they’d taken the food into the house, Kyle and Jared were pretty much forced to undress right there and then go shower. Kyle was really starting to hate this. He felt fine and the air outside didn’t smell different from normal, so did they really have to go through all this crap every time they left the house? It seemed really stupid to him.

 

_The next group of patients had just arrived, so the medical staff donned their PPE and did one final check of the retrofitted isolation areas while their charges were going through the intake. Other areas of the hospital were suffering because personnel from all departments had been redirected to care for these radiation victims and no specialists had arrived yet, even though everyone talked among themselves that it must happen at some point._

This one is a firefighter, Troye Winters. He has severe exposure and isn’t a candidate for a bone marrow transplant, so we’re putting him on comfort care. _The nurse pointed to the chart._ This one is a plant worker, Carl Rein. We don’t know the dose he took so they’ve been giving him platelet transfusions and iron supplements.

I see, _the doctor nodded._ We’ll run the test when he gets here to see if he’s a transplant candidate.

The next one’s a plant worker too… Brendon Stahl. His estimated dose is 800 rem, but he’s been getting consistent blood transfusions and intravenous electrolyte replacement. So he may be a candidate as well, even with the high exposure.

800 rem? _the doctor frowned._ That’s such a large dose… are they sure he’s a potential for a bone marrow transplant?

That’s what they said, _the nurse shrugged._ I only know what it says on his chart. Even if he’s not a candidate, he needs skin grafts all across-

_Another nurse in a hazmat suit came running up to them to interrupt their conversation:_ One of the new intakes is coding in bed four!

Why didn’t you just page me? _the doctor snapped even as he was sprinting up the hall._

I’m sorry, it’s under my PPE and I couldn’t reach it.

_They got into the room and then the clear plastic cubicle._

He’s in arrest, get the crash cart. Airway?

Obstructed.

We’ll intubate. Okay. _The conducting pads were on the patient’s chest and the gel was on the paddles._ Clear!

_Shock. No rhythm._

Give him five milligrams of epi. _The patient was injected with epinephrine while manual ventilation was started. No rhythm._

Clear!

_Shock. No rhythm. The doctor swiped the paddles together to redistribute the gel and the shock was upped to 300._

Clear!

_Shock._

_No rhythm._

_Five radiation victims had been admitted this morning, and they’d already lost one. Everything was cleaned up, the crash cart was put back and reset. All the data was charted. The doctor bleakly checked the patient’s name, and looked at the nurse he’d been talking to in the hall._

Well, now we know he’s not a candidate for a transplant… God dammit.

**_STAHL, BRENDON F._ **

**_TIME OF DEATH 09:37_ **

 

Alex wasn’t alone anymore, but he wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

He’d been brought to this place yesterday and the beds were a little less painful, at least, but his life was still pretty terrible. They were separated by a curtain, Alex and his roommate, and he had the bed by the window. So things weren’t all bad, but they could sure as hell be better.

“Is someone there?” the person whispered.

Judging by the voice, it was a woman. She’d just been brought in a few minutes ago.

“Yes,” Alex croaked.

“What happened? Nobody would tell us anything. I just want to find out what happened so that I can write to my son and tell him things will be okay.”

“Don’t know.” He was so thirsty. “I’m just an EMT.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman murmured through the curtain. “I’m a surgical nurse. I saw when you guys had to come in for treatment. They said there was radiation…?”

“Yeah. Radiation. Made us all sick.”

“We were exposed because of our patients. It’s not your fault, though. We needed to help even with the radiation.”

“You did surgery?” Alex asked quietly. He just couldn’t talk any louder, his mouth hurt too much. “I’m having surgery tonight. What happens for a bone marrow transplant?”

“I’ve never seen one of those,” she replied. “I’m sorry. Most of the procedures I assisted were staging and debulking tumors. Bone marrow transplants were given to leukemia patients.”

“Oh.”

Alex closed his eyes to avoid looking at how his arm had been hacked off at the elbow. God, that fucking bothered him.

“Do you want to talk?”

“About what?” he rasped. His mouth was dry like he’d taken Benadryl, but after the isolation of the last couple weeks Alex was desperate for human contact.

“I don’t know. What was it like over there?”

“People running around,” he recalled. “Rain. It was raining really hard. And a big fire.”

“Wow,” she remarked. “That sounds like something… there were so many patients, but their burns were really strange. Some were just normal thermal wounds, but there were others whose burns didn’t appear until the next day or so. I’ve never seen that before. Sometimes the dressings just exacerbated things, too. We didn’t know what to do.”

 

Derek had taken to making notes on his phone in order to keep track of everything. The emergency responders and reactor operators who didn’t die yet had been transferred out of the hot zone for the most part, so his patrols were through largely empty rows of cubicles with the odd patient. Those odd patients, though, were slowly increasing in number again as of yesterday morning, and now it was other national guard troops being brought to them.

According to today’s pre-shift briefing, there was only one other medical post being run at the moment, just for screening purposes. Any injuries or accidental dose accumulations were being sent to St. Thomas until they could be medevaced, but radiation accidents seemed to be rare. Most of their patients had heat injuries from the PPE, a couple were from broken bones or strains. Only three had suffered sudden acute exposure, and they were the ones Derek saw in his section.

_“How much did they tell you?” … “Fucking nothing. ‘Spray the hose on this spot.’ ‘Add this much chemical to the solution.’ Fucking nothing at all.” … “And what did you see while you were there?” … “Just me and they guys, doing our jobs. Um. The fire trucks were all still there, though. It was weird. We weren’t supposed to go near them. I guess somebody else was going to tow them out.”_

Derek was forbidden to interrupt any interviews in progress, but so far he hadn’t been caught listening in on them. He offered the sick soldiers water after each one, because he’d heard several patients complain that despite the IVs their mouths were always swollen, sticky and painful. So he brought them their water and sometimes helped them hold the emesis basins as they threw up right after drinking.

Because there were so few patients, though, he’d just stop and talk with them once in awhile if they were awake. Despite the fact that Derek was assigned to the night watch, a lot of the time they were still up, because they were too sick to sleep well.

“Good morning, sergeant,” Derek tried to joke as he entered the cubicle and saluted. It was 00:14.

“At ease, corporal,” Zimmern croaked out, also managing a salute with his bandaged right hand. “Anything to report?”

“Nothing, sergeant,” Derek answered as he came up to the clear inner barrier. “You should’ve asked me a week and a half ago.”

“You’ve got a good posting, Bohr,” Zimmern remarked. “My squad was in charge of isolating the storm runoff. Totally pointless, it’s all in the ground by now, and even what we did suck up into the tanks was a pain in the ass.”

“Is that how you got dosed?”

“Damn straight. The tanks were manufactured shittily, two of them cracked open. One just contaminated a parking lot. The other dumped all over me.”

“Tough break, sarge,” Derek nodded. “How many rem did you get?”

“Who knows?” Zimmern coughed, sounding indifferent. “Enough to land me here.”

 

_Dear Kyle,_

 

_I know there are hospitals in Vancouver, but the army is in charge, so they’re keeping me here for now with the other patients because it’s easier for them. But I’ve finally been moved to a hospital away from the accident site, so I’m sure I’ll get better and come home soon._

_I’m glad there’s information on the TV to help you all stay safe. Just remember that it won’t be forever, okay? Eventually things will go back to normal. I’m glad you’re enjoying your video games. Since you can’t go outside, it’s good you have something to keep you busy until it’s safe again._

_I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything new, because they haven’t told me anything new either. But they told me when I got to this hospital that I’m outside the dangerous zone, so it sounds like there was only a small area that was really affected. That means they’ll stop washing the streets soon and you can go outside again._

 

_Love, Mom_

 


	15. When the information isn't available.

A new intake, right at the beginning of the shift. This had “long night” written all over it for Derek.

“Okay, raise your arms… good,” he nodded as he swept the probe just above the private’s skin. You weren’t supposed to touch the probe to the object because it could leave contamination and alter future readings and blah-blah-blah. “Hey, look at this.”

Yates leaned over to watch the display - 26, 37, 29, and so on as Derek moved the probe. Then he hit that one spot on the private’s shoulder and it dropped down to 5.

“That’s… not normal.”

“What is it?” the private asked, then started coughing violently.

“You average 25 rem all over your body except this one little place,” Derek explained, pointing with a gloved finger. “What the hell were you even doing?”

“I had to put the winch onto the fire trucks so we could tow them out of the way… we needed room to move around at the plant.”

Derek and Yates shared a look; even only able to see each other’s eyes, they both had the same thought: _This kid will die in two weeks._

“Um… so did you get sprayed or doused with something?” Yates questioned, already smearing the private’s skin with iodine for when it would inevitably break out into nuclear burns.

“No, I just put the hook under the axle like they told me to. Why?”

“Kid, you’re glowing so bad it’s not safe for us to be around you,” Yates told him bluntly. “You’re going to die in sixteen days. There’s no _way_ that happened just from helping tow some trucks. Did you take off your respirator? Were you wearing your PPE the right way?”

“They made us tie on these metal sheets over our suits,” the private shrugged. “But it was so damn hot out I couldn’t move under the things. I just took the one off my back so it wouldn’t be as heavy.”

The medic groaned. “You didn’t wear the lead plating? You know there’s a reason they made you put that on in the first place, right? The brass isn’t responsible for this fuck-up, you know. You got yourself killed all on your own.”

The young trooper seemed horrified, now, but Yates was just muttering to himself behind his respirator and not even looking anymore. Derek rolled his eyes at the other corporal and set the radiation meter aside for the moment.

“Look, private…”

“Erikson.”

“Erikson,” he nodded. “Your body’s putting out over 30 roentgens _per hour._ That means you were out there unprotected long enough to become a radioactive object. We’ll do what we can, but really that just means we’ll try our best to make it not hurt. We will, though. I’ll make sure they do everything they can for you.”

“But… I thought… they just told me where to put the hookup for the winch. And the fire’s been out for a long time, I didn’t think…”

Derek sighed. “I know. How long was your shift?”

“We started at 05.00… right before we were about to get done, I started puking. My nose was bleeding pretty bad for awhile, too.”

“They didn’t send you here when your nose started bleeding?”

“I mean, I was wearing a mask. I figured they’d give me shit if I started bitching about it,” Erikson explained.

“Okay then…” Derek shook his head, which was kind of a mistake because the weight of the filter wrenched his respirator around some. It didn’t move off-center or anything, but it wasn’t comfortable. “Look. We’re going to have to do another round of decon on your skin, because it really isn’t safe for us to be this close to you. Did they scrub you on your way in?”

“Yeah, a couple times. At the end the sergeant just swore at me a bunch and sent me here.”

It seemed like an oversight on the part of the higher-ups, to make the soldiers wear extra lead sheets over their MOPP suits but not explain to them why they needed to in the first place. If they were that desperate, the radiation must really be high over there, so why risk the ones like Erikson not understanding and taking the things off? How many more would have to die for that error?

That was a thought he decided to save for later. Derek helped Erikson back to decon, which also meant all the plastic covers on the floors they’d walked on needed to be scrubbed as well. He checked the route with his detector while two privates from another platoon smeared decon gel all over the place.

Eventually, Derek had to go back on patrol through the mostly-empty cubicles, and around 19:30 Erikson was returned to his spot, looking much the worse for wear. “Did they get you clean?”

“No,” the young trooper muttered. “They did it over and over but the meter didn’t go down. Not even a little.”

“Here’s what’s going to happen. That medic who did your intake is a jackass, so I’ll go get someone better. We’re going to put antiseptic on your skin again and probably bandage you, and then I’ll bring you some water if you’re thirsty.”

“I’m thirsty, but if I drink anything I’ll start puking again…”

“I know, but you should try anyway, it’ll help.”

 

The radiologist was on the other side of the curtain, but of course Debby was listening in. Alex had been lucid when he woke up an hour ago, but he still sounded very weak and exhausted.

“The interesting thing is that you have almost no internal exposure,” the radiologist explained. “You took an extremely high dose, but it was all external. So now that you’ve had the bone marrow transplant, we’re going to give you skin grafts on the areas that are the most badly burned. Your chances of recovery look very good.”

“Internal exposure?”

“If you breathed in radioactive gas, or if you ate contaminated food. That would be internal exposure.”

“Oh… I wore my mask the whole time.”

“That’s good, that’s very good,” the radiologist answered. “So you wouldn’t have breathed in any nuclear material. Alright. We’re going to do another exam this afternoon to determine where you’ll need skin grafts, okay? The nurse should be over with your next dose of pain medication at ten.”

“Okay.”

Debby waited for the radiologist to leave before getting out of bed. She was a little dizzy, but it wasn’t debilitating. She wrapped one of the blankets around herself and went to sit with her roommate - he was worse off than her.

“Good morning, Alex,” she offered quietly, settling in the chair next to his bed. It was a relief to sit again. “It sounds like you’re going to get better soon.”

“Maybe,” he mumbled. “I don’t feel like it, though.”

Debby took a good look at her roommate - his lower left arm was wrapped in gauze that was starting to soak through with lymph and would need to be changed soon. His lower right arm was missing entirely.

“Do you mind if I ask what happened?”

Alex closed his eyes.

“I got radiated. I’m… uh, I _was_ right-handed. So I was using that hand more and I guess the victims were ‘dirty.’ It was just blisters, and then all the skin came off. The weird thing was I lost feeling right before that. I couldn’t feel my hand.”

“The skin died,” Debby nodded. “It looks like they disarticulated the joint…?”

“Huh?”

She shook her head. “Never mind. Do you have anyone waiting for you? I can write to them for you if you want.”

“No. There’s no one. I want to know what happened to the others from my station, but they’re all laid up, too. Nobody’s been able to tell me about them.”

She breathed out silently through her nose, then rested a shaking hand on his upper arm. “When we get out, I’ll write to you,” she promised. “You really don’t have any family? How old are you?”

“Twenty four. My dad was a one night stand and my mom’s… gone.”

Alex was just ten years older than her son, and already he was an amputee with no relatives.

“I’m sorry.” It felt so inadequate. “Well, like I said, I’ll write to you.”

 

_Mom,_

 

_How much longer until you get home? Its been a long time now. Dad and aunt Nichole are worried._

_There’s all kinds of weird stuff on tv right now. They said not to drink milk or juice, so there’s stations all over Vancouver giving out bottled water and stuff. We’re supposed to eat canned food or stuff that comes in plastic packages because it’s safer, so they give us some of that, too. I think sometimes it’s those army meals that soldiers eat. Sometimes they taste good, but not all the time. Sometimes they’re weird._

_The news reporters said that the way Canada knew about it is because the detectors at the power plants were going crazy. But America won’t say anything about it. Dad said he thinks its the place he used to work, because they had a lot of problems before. So maybe they had a real big problem this time and thats why the detectors at power plants up here went off. But the news doesn’t have info about it, because America won’t say anything._

_The news said that its not as dangerous as it was last week, but there going to keep washing the streets to be safe. The house is still all taped shut with plastic and stuff, so its still really hot inside. We have to wear rubber boots and rain coats and masks to go to the store. It really sucks and I’m sick of being inside all the time._

 

_Kyle_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kyle's spelling/grammar mistakes are on purpose.
> 
> One of the control room operators from Chernobyl was examined and the doctors only found one small spot on his back that wasn't radioactive. When he died two weeks after the accident, he was buried under cement tiles.
> 
> Chernobyl only became known to the world after the Geiger counters at Swedish nuclear power stations started going berserk. The Swedes took radiation measurements in the sky using fighter planes and were able to determine there was a major accident within the USSR because of the wind direction.


End file.
